This past weekend, one of the members of our hopeful community sent me a sign that he had just encountered.

It is the handiwork of a Maine artist named Charlie Hewitt. In Charlie’s own words, “Maine is a dark place in the winter and I felt compelled to illuminate that corner of our world with a message of hope.” The message has now spread to seven states in the United States and internationally to places like Ukraine. Charlie is truly an inspiration to all of us.

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My stand here

Hope doesn’t just sit inside a person — it spills outward. People who score high on hope don’t just feel more optimistic about their own lives; they actually do more for others: helping out, volunteering, showing up for their community, working through conflicts instead of avoiding them. A review in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology backs this up, showing hope consistently predicts these outward-facing behaviors — it’s less a private feeling and more something that reaches the people around you.

Giving hope pays you back too.

Even small acts — encouraging someone, telling them you appreciate them — are tied to less depression, anxiety, and loneliness, plus better physical health, probably because helping others fires the same reward circuitry as being helped. So passing hope along isn’t one-way generosity. It’s a loop that benefits both ends.

Today’s Song: "Wide Open Heart" by Evanescence

Question

How are you spreading hope to others every day? Please drop your hopeful thoughts in the comments below.

And if today’s dose was useful, share it with someone who could use some hope.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 83 countries throughout the World.

What if the stranger who smiled at you in the grocery store line wasn’t just being nice — they were doing something a Harvard research team can actually measure?

Every time I ask this hopeful community “what gives you hope,” I brace myself for something small. Instead I get flooded. In the last three days alone, here’s a sample of what came back (forgive me if I couldn’t fit every pearl of wisdom in):

1. “Love gives me hope.”

2. “Most of the strangers I meet are friendly, open and giving and new found friends are just as willing to my opinion and I am to theirs.”

3. “It gives me hope to see kids today do all kinds of crazy stuff outside and coming home dirty, tired and maybe with some minor wounds. Some of my best days were outside with no adults watching. Love this generation who put the screens down and get dirty til the street lights come on. Also love all the people who respond to “ good day” from the old guy with the two little dogs and his variety of walking sticks.”

4. “Sunrise”

5. “People are what give me hope. They always surprise me when least expected.”

6. “My grandchildren wishing me a Happy Birthday gives me hope!”

7. “Hope is the absence of negligence.”

8. “My children and grandchildren give me hope. The children have done well in life and they live in a nice place, with many friends. The grandchildren are intelligent and talented and have good prospects for the future. Above all however, they are all good people and have empathy for others.”

9. “When I can see how real people truly are. Younger folks working to put out a fire, and it saved our house and several others. They worked day and night, and we even had to evacuate. The towns fire truck was being used in another town, and some fella brought his truck with water. Love in Action I call it. When I can go to the grocery store and get smiles from strangers, . When people make it a point to smile and be warming to the soul, in the bank, restaurant, gas station. You name it. When a dog can lick my hand. A beautiful sunset, ..the Moon.”

10. “I am hopeful because I have been reading posts of animals who were scarce becoming more plentiful and returning to their habitat and improving the land.”

    ---

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    ---

Here’s the part that stopped me. Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program tracked older adults for years and found that the ones who scored higher on hope had a lower risk of dying from any cause and fewer chronic illnesses than their less-hopeful peers — even after accounting for the usual suspects. It wasn’t a cure-all: hope didn’t budge their odds on diabetes or stroke. But on the things it did touch, it touched them like medicine.

Hope isn’t a mood you’re waiting to feel. It’s a habit ten strangers just proved they’re already practicing.

Today’s song: “I Can See Clearly Now” — Johnny Nash.

“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone... gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiny day.” A literal instruction manual for what the folks in #9 lived through.

Question

What’s the last thing a stranger did — a smile, a wave, a truck full of water when your town’s own was somewhere else — that made you think, okay, people are still good? Tell me in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
This was built for the days when it doesn’t.
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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 83 countries throughout the World.

Source note: hope/mortality finding from Long, Kim, Chen, Wilson, Worthington & VanderWeele, “The role of hope in subsequent health and well-being for older adults: an outcome-wide longitudinal approach,” Global Epidemiology, 2020.

What if the thing most likely to fail became the thing the whole world travels to see?

That's the question that stopped me in the square in Pisa. I'd seen a thousand photos of this tower. Nothing prepared me for standing under it — for the very physical, very unsettling feeling of a 190-foot marble bell tower leaning toward me at nearly four degrees off vertical. My first instinct wasn't wonder. It was get out of the way.

But then I started thinking about what it actually took to keep this thing standing. And that's where the hope crept in.

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Here's the fact that stuck with me: for most of its 850 years, engineers had no idea how to fix the tower without making it worse. Every attempt to correct the lean — piling on lead counterweights, drilling underneath it — nearly toppled it further. It wasn't until 1999 that a team led by soil-mechanics expert John Burland found the answer, and it wasn't reinforcement. It was subtraction. Working in five-gallon increments over the north side, they extracted about 38 cubic meters of soil — a process so delicate they measured progress in *arc seconds*. Over a year, the tower leaned back roughly half a degree and rose 38 centimeters. Not straight. Just safer. Just enough. Engineers now estimate it's good for another 300 years.

And here's the part that got me: in 2024, monitors picked up something nobody expected. The tower had kept quietly correcting itself for over a decade, tightening by another four centimeters, entirely on its own — the slow, patient result of work done a generation earlier finally settling into place.

The tower didn't get fixed. It got understood.

I think we do this to ourselves too — we treat our own leaning as a problem to be solved, a flaw to argue ourselves out of, when maybe the sturdier move is the one Pisa's engineers eventually chose: stop fighting the tilt, and instead learn exactly what's holding it up. We spend so much energy trying to stand up perfectly straight. Maybe the real work is learning how to lean well.

Nobody visits Pisa to see a tower standing at attention. They come for the one that's still upright despite everything working against it. Maybe that's the more honest monument.

Today’s Song: “Lean on Me” — Bill Withers

Question

What's one thing in your life that's still standing, tilted and all — and who or what has been quietly holding it up?** Tell me in the comments.

And if today’s dose resonated, share it with someone who might need a reminder that forward is still possible.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 83 countries throughout the World.

What if the most hopeful place on earth isn’t a mindset you have to build — it’s a two-word greeting said by gas station attendants, grandmothers, and surfers, dozens of times a day, until it stops being a phrase and becomes a operating system?

That’s Costa Rica. A friend just got back from there, and it sent me straight back through my own memories of the place — I’ve been many times, and every single trip, the same two words followed me everywhere: pura vida.

Most visitors translate it as “pure life” and leave it at that — a nice bumper sticker, a thing you say instead of goodbye. But spend real time there and you notice pura vida isn’t describing a feeling. It’s doing something closer to a psychological reset button. Ask a Tico how the harvest went, how the traffic was, how the diagnosis came back — the answer can still be pura vida. Not because everything is fine. Because they’ve decided how they’re going to hold it.

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Psychologists actually have a name for that decision. Hope, in the research literature, isn’t the same thing as optimism. Optimism is passive — it’s the expectation that things will work out. Hope, as psychologist Charles Snyder defined it decades ago, has two working parts: agency (the belief that you have some power to create change) and pathways (the ability to imagine more than one road to get there). And a 2025 University of Missouri study went further, finding that hope predicts a person’s sense of meaning in life more powerfully than happiness or gratitude do. Not happier. More meaningful. Costa Ricans, without ever reading the journal article, built an entire national vocabulary around exactly that finding.

You can see the pathways thinking in the country’s own history. In 1948, Costa Rica did something almost no nation has done before or since — it abolished its army. Not out of naivety, but as a bet: redirect that money into schools and healthcare instead, and see what a country becomes. Nearly eighty years later, it’s one of the most literate, longest-living, most biodiverse-protecting nations on the planet. That’s hope with its sleeves rolled up. Agency and pathways, at the scale of a country.

I think pura vida gets mistaken for toxic positivity by people who’ve never had to use it. It isn’t. Toxic positivity denies the hard thing is happening. Pura vida looks straight at the hard thing and still chooses the phrase. That’s not denial — that’s discipline. It’s the harder, more mature cousin of “good vibes only,” and it deserves more credit than it gets.

Hope isn’t only found at destinations. Hope is often found in the middle.

…in the space between the flight delay and the ocean, between the diagnosis and the decision, between the question and the answer you haven’t found yet. Costa Rica just happens to have given that space a name.

Today’s song: Danza de los Diablitos

the ceremonial song-and-dance of the Boruca people, performed every December 30th–January 2nd to reenact their ancestors’ resistance to colonization. It’s centuries older than “pura vida” itself, and it’s its own kind of hope: proof that a people can be pushed to the edge and still choose, generation after generation, to keep dancing.

Question

So — what’s the last thing a stranger did that made you think, okay, people are still good? Or, in the spirit of today’s dose: what’s the one word or phrase from somewhere you’ve traveled that quietly changed how you carry hard days? Drop it in the comments below.

And if today’s dose was useful, share it with someone who could use a little pura vida.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 83 countries throughout the World.

Why do the most hopeful people I meet keep turning out to be under the age of eleven?

My wife and I were wedged onto a narrow alley street in Bologna, Italy, at a small trattoria, the kind where your table sits inches from the next. The heat of the summer was brutal — all of Europe was cooking — but there we were anyway, sitting outside because that’s what you do in Bologna.

Next to us: a mom and her two kids, 10 and 6. Between them, the family carried passports and roots from the Netherlands, Korea, Greece, and Belgium (I may be forgetting one). Dad is in construction, working a job in Greece. Mom and the kids were en route to visit family in Belgium. This is just how their life moved — country to country, job to job.

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Within a couple of quiet minutes at the table, it was obvious these weren’t ordinary kids. They spoke at least four languages fluently, switching between them without a flicker of effort. They were poised, curious, and completely at ease with two strangers seated a foot away. The bond between them and their mother was tight and easy. They treated the world like it was built for them to walk around in.

Turns out, there’s a name for what I was watching.

In the 1950s, sociologist Ruth Hill Useem coined the term “Third Culture Kid” after studying American families raising children abroad in India. A TCK doesn’t fully belong to their parents’ home culture or to the culture they’re raised in — they build a third one, stitched together from every place they’ve lived. And the research on what that does to a kid is genuinely striking: according to Useem and Cottrell’s landmark 1993 study, Third Culture Kids are four times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than the average student.

Hope isn’t only found at destinations. Hope is often found in the middle — in a kid who has no fixed address but somehow has a rock-solid sense of self.

We spend a lot of energy worrying that a rootless childhood will produce anxious, unmoored adults. Watching that family, I’m not convinced rootlessness is the problem we think it is. What actually seemed to matter wasn’t which country they were standing in — it was that Mom was fully present, everywhere, all the time. Stability, it turns out, might live in a person more than in a zip code.

I left that trattoria thinking there are more kids like these two out there than we give the next generation credit for. And that whatever mess the current generations hand off, it might be landing in far more capable hands than the headlines suggest.

Today’s Song: 🎵 “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers

…a journey song about crossing distance for people you love.

Question

What’s the last thing a stranger did — or a stranger’s kid said — that made you think, okay, people are still good?

Drop it in the comments below.

And if today’s dose resonated, share it with someone who might need a reminder that forward is still possible.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 83 countries throughout the World.

Have you ever watched an entire city hold its breath for less than two minutes — and then break into tears, whether it won or lost?

A few weeks ago I stood in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy, wedged shoulder to shoulder with thousands of strangers, waiting for the Palio.

If you don’t know it: the Palio is a bareback horse race that has run in this same shell-shaped square since the 1600s. Ten horses, three laps, roughly ninety seconds. No saddles. No rules against jostling your rival off his line. The prize isn’t money — it’s a hand-painted silk banner called the drappellone, bearing an image of the Virgin Mary, carried home to whichever of Siena’s seventeen contrade — its historic city wards — wins.

Here’s the part that got me. The contrade aren’t clubs you join. You’re born into one, the way you’re born into a family. Each has its own church, its own colors, its own museum of past victories, its own founding myth. And each carries a rivalry with a neighboring contrada so old that nobody quite remembers how it started — only that it matters, deeply, every single year.

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The fact I haven’t been able to shake: in Siena, a child is baptized twice. Once at the font of the cathedral. And once, in a smaller ceremony the city still guards fondly, at the fontanina — the little stone fountain of the contrada into whose streets they happened to be born. You belong to something before you can walk.

I watched grown men weep after their contrada’s horse crossed the line in dead last. Not from despair — from something closer to relief. They’d shown up. Their colors had run. That was the whole of it.

Hope isn’t only built by winning. Hope is often built by showing up for the same ninety seconds, year after year, with people who would carry you home either way.

Here’s where I’ll admit something that might sound strange for a newsletter about hope: I don’t think the Palio is really about the race at all. I think a horse race that lasts ninety seconds, after months of preparation, tells you that hope was never supposed to be efficient. We keep looking for hope in outcomes — the win, the promotion, the diagnosis that comes back clear. But in Siena, hope lives in the belonging that survives the outcome, whichever way it breaks. That’s a harder kind of hope to build than optimism. It’s also the only kind that doesn’t collapse when things go wrong.

🎵 Today’s song: “Nessun Dorma” — Puccini (from Turandot).

An aria about staying awake through the dark, certain that dawn — and victory — is coming. It’s what the whole piazza sounds like in the hour before the race.

What’s the last place you belonged to so completely that losing didn’t feel like losing?

Drop it in the comments — I’d love to know which room, team, family, or town has held you like that.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

In the spring of 2020, taxi and limo licenses in Italy were practically being given away. Drivers were walking off the job in droves — nobody was going anywhere, so why keep paying for the right to drive them? One young man looked at that same empty market and decided it was exactly the moment to buy in.

We met him recently in Bologna while traveling through Italy. He’d quit a stable job at the height of the pandemic to become a professional driver — taking people wherever they needed to go, at a time when almost nowhere felt safe to go. Licenses were cheap because everyone else wanted out. He bought one anyway, betting on a future no one else could see yet.

The first year nearly broke him. Empty streets, empty wallets, a lot of second-guessing. But by year two, something had shifted: most of his competition had already left the profession, worn down by the same year that had almost worn him down too. The roads that had been so quiet were now his. Today, he runs a thriving business — built entirely on a decision he made when the smart move, by every visible metric, was to do the opposite.

Psychologists have a name for what he was running on. C.R. Snyder, who spent his career studying hope, called it agency thinking — the belief that you, personally, can move toward a better outcome, even before you can see the road that gets you there. It’s different from optimism, which just expects things to work out. Agency thinking is the harder, more useful cousin: it expects you to be the one who makes them work out.

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It’s also, it turns out, good business. Researchers at the Kauffman Foundation found that more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 — including Disney, GE, and Microsoft — were founded during a recession or bear market. Hope, apparently, has excellent timing.

Hope doesn’t wait for the market to recover. Hope buys the license anyway.

Here’s the part I’ll say plainly, even though it cuts against most advice: I don’t think you should wait for certainty before you leap. Certainty is for people who want to arrive after the crowd. The empty room — the cheap license, the quiet market, the moment everyone else is walking away — is usually the most hopeful place to be, precisely because no one else is there.

Question

What’s the license you bought when everyone else was selling theirs? A decision, big or small, that you made when the smart money said don’t. What happened?

Drop it in the comments below.

🎵 Today’s Song: “Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu)” — Domenico Modugno.

Sometimes hope sounds exactly like this: an Italian classic about flying, painted blue, unreasonably joyful — written by a man betting on something nobody else believed in yet.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What if the most hopeful place you visited this year wasn’t a hospital wing, or a graduation stage, or a sunrise over the ocean — but a cramped workshop that smells like varnish and sawdust, on a quiet street in a small Italian city most people couldn’t find on a map?

That’s where I found myself recently, in Cremona, standing in the workshop of a violin maker — a luthier — watching him run his thumb along the belly of a viola that won’t be played by anyone for another year.

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Cremona has been making violins, violas, and cellos since the 1500s, when Andrea Amati basically invented the instrument as we know it — the shape, the proportions, the four strings — for the French royal court. His grandson, Nicolò Amati, refined the form and then did something even more important: he trained the next generation. Two of his students were a young Antonio Stradivari and a maker named Andrea Guarneri, founder of a dynasty whose own grandson, Giuseppe “del Gesù” Guarneri, would go on to build the violin that caused Paganini to refuse to play on anything else.

Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri — three family names, one city, and four centuries later they’re still the standard every contemporary maker is measured against. Not copied exactly, but studied like scripture: the arch of the plates, the varnish, the way the wood was even shaped by the unusually cold climate the trees grew in during the Little Ice Age, which some researchers believe is part of why that 300-year-old spruce still sings the way it does.

Here’s what surprised me most: the craft never actually died. Cremona is home to something like 150 working violin, viola, and cello makers today, enough that the city’s tradition of hand-building string instruments was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2012. There’s a school in town where you can apprentice for years just to learn how to bend the ribs of a violin over heat without cracking the wood. People still move to this specific city, for this specific reason, four hundred years after the fact.

Psychologists have a name for what I watched happen in that workshop. Erik Erikson called it generativity — the human drive, usually strongest in midlife, to build or teach or care for something that will outlast you. Not for credit. Not because anyone’s watching. Just because part of being fully human is wanting to leave something behind for people you’ll never meet.

That’s exactly what I saw. The maker we visited has spent years training a younger luthier alongside him — someone in his twenties, learning the same techniques passed down from Amati’s own students — not because he has to, but because the tradition only survives if someone hands it forward.

When I asked him what kept him going after decades at the bench, he didn’t talk about money or reputation. He talked about a dream:

“Mine is a continuous experiment; a journey of twenty thousand leagues into history, art and music. I’d like to fulfil every musician’s dream: to experience the pleasure of owning and playing something created just for you, not just any Cremonese string instrument.”

He also said something else that stuck with me — that a violin is “the most human of all instruments,” borrowing a line from Louisa May Alcott. And that the real test of his work isn’t how the instrument looks. It’s the moment he strings it for the first time and finally hears whether all those months of patience were worth it.

A violin is just wood until someone believes someone else will play it after they’re gone.

That’s the whole craft, really. That’s the whole hope of it. You spend a year — sometimes longer — shaping something you may never fully hear reach its potential, trusting that whoever eventually plays it will find their own sound in the wood you shaped. That’s not so different from raising a kid, writing a book, planting an orchard you won’t sit under, or teaching someone who’ll eventually outgrow you.

Hope, most days, looks less like optimism and more like showing up to build something slow.

My question for you

What’s something you’re building, teaching, or planting right now that you might never see finished — and who are you doing it for?

Drop it in the comments below.

Today’s song: J.S. Bach, Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor, for solo violin.

One instrument, one player, fourteen minutes — often performed on instruments that are two or three hundred years old, carrying a single voice further than seems possible. Fitting, for a piece about things built to outlast their maker.

And if today’s dose gave you something, share it with someone who could use a little sweetness.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

Why does your body keep working on you long after you’ve stopped watching?

My wife and I were recently travelling with old friends in Europe. We fell into a small ritual: every morning, before coffee, someone read a poem out loud. Just five minutes, letting a stranger’s words set the tone for the day. Some mornings it missed. Some mornings nobody spoke for a full minute afterward.

One of those mornings, it was “Ode to Healing” by John Updike. It opens:

“A scab is a beautiful thing — a coin the body has minted, with an invisible motto: In God We Trust.“

(It’s still under copyright, so I won’t reprint the whole thing here — but you can read it in full at Michigan Quarterly Review. Worth the two minutes.)

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That opening line rearranged my whole morning. Updike takes the least glamorous evidence of injury — a scab — and reframes it as proof that something in you is already at work on your behalf, unasked, unapplauded.

Turns out he wasn’t just being poetic. He was describing biology almost exactly.

Wound healing doesn’t stop when the scab falls off and the skin looks normal again. There’s a stage called the remodeling phase, where the body quietly reorganizes collagen fibers into a stronger structure — and it keeps going for up to two years after a wound has visibly closed. The part you can see is the fast part. The real strengthening happens invisibly, long after everyone — including you — has stopped paying attention to it.

Hope, like healing, mostly happens somewhere you can’t see it.

I think we’ve made “healing” sound too passive lately — like something that happens to you if you just rest and wait long enough. Updike’s scab isn’t passive. It’s minted — like currency, like effort. Your body isn’t sitting back hoping to feel better; it’s working a shift, whether you notice or not. I think hope works the same way. It’s not a mood that catches you. It’s a shift you work, even on the days you can’t see any progress at all.

Today’s Song: “Fix You” — Coldplay.

“Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones” — same idea as the poem: repair as something that happens to you, quietly, from the inside.

Question

So — what’s a scar, visible or invisible, that you’re now oddly proud of? What’s the story behind it? Drop it in the comments below.

And if today’s dose was useful, send it to someone who’s in the middle of healing from something.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

Why does watching a parent teach their kid to ride a bike make your chest go tight in a good way? Why does a marmot sprawled out on a warm rock do more for your mood than an hour of good news would? There’s a reason these small, ordinary moments hit the way they do — and psychologists actually have a name for it. More on that in a minute.

I’ve written about this topic before, but one of our new readers shared her thoughts on how she finds hope in everyday things, and she wanted me to share them with all of you. Here’s what she wrote:

“Surprisingly, what gives me hope is in the small, everyday things:”

• Marmots sunning themselves on rocks

• A parent teaching a child to ride a bike

• Rainbow colored hair on people of all ages

• Kids playing soccer on a school field

• Neighbors knowing neighbors and helping one another out

• Introverts that push themselves to make protest signs and attend the protest

• The beauty of nature in all its seasons

• People who are walking, waiting for a bus, in line at the grocery store, talking to you, etc and are not on their cell phones

• Younger people who do have social skills, despite what older people say!

• The fact that hope is a worthy goal to pursue always, despite where we are at the time

There’s a term for what she’s describing. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls it moral elevation — that warm, expansive feeling in your chest when you witness someone else being kind or good. It’s a distinct, measurable emotional response, separate from ordinary happiness, and the research on it is genuinely surprising: simply watching someone act with decency measurably increases the odds that you’ll turn around and act with decency yourself. Goodness, it turns out, is contagious before it’s even inspiring.

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Hope isn’t only found in headlines. It’s found on the sidewalk, in line at the grocery store, in a kid wobbling toward their first solo pedal stroke.

Here’s where I’ll say something slightly unpopular: I think we’ve trained ourselves to look for hope in the wrong places — in news cycles, in grand gestures, in things that are engineered to be inspiring. But the real stuff is almost always smaller, quieter, and closer than that. It’s a neighbor. A rainbow-haired teenager. A marmot that has nowhere better to be.

Today’s Song: “Three Little Birds” — Bob Marley & The Wailers

Because “every little thing gonna be alright” is basically the mantra of this whole post.

Question

What’s the last small, ordinary moment that made you think, okay, people are still good? Drop it in the comments below.

And if today’s dose resonated, share it with someone who might need a reminder that forward is still possible.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What if the most radical act of hope isn’t believing things will get better — but showing up, year after year, for the people who already know you?

My wife and I were having dinner at a small hilltop restaurant in Tuscany when six men sat down at the table next to us. All from a small town near Brussels, Belgium. All friends for over forty-five years. Two of them were quick to tell us, with obvious pride, that their wives — who were not with them — got along wonderfully too.

They were on their annual five-day Vespa journey.

The Pyrenees one year. Scotland. Ireland. Other places I’ve already forgotten because I was too busy watching their faces. This year, they had decided to retrace one of Italy’s most legendary cycling routes — and they had just come from the Piaggio/Vespa museum, eager, almost giddy, to show us pictures on their phones.

I sat there watching them and felt something I can only describe as hope.

Not hope in the abstract. Something more specific and more earned.

Researchers at Harvard have been tracking what makes people thrive for over eighty years — it’s the longest running study on human happiness ever conducted. Their conclusion, after all that time and all those subjects: the quality of your close relationships at 50 predicts how healthy and happy you’ll be at 80, more than wealth, more than fame, more than almost anything else. Not the number of friends. The depth of them.

These six men were living proof.

Here’s what I noticed — and what I think explains why their friendship carries so much hope, both for them and for anyone lucky enough to sit near them:

They witness each other. When someone has known you for forty-five years, they’ve seen you fail and still showed up. That’s not just loyalty. That’s evidence — evidence that you are worth showing up for. And that evidence, accumulated over decades, becomes its own form of hope.

They make plans. Every year, they commit to another journey. Every booking, every route traced on a map, is a quiet declaration: I believe we’ll both be here next year. There is no more hopeful sentence in the human language than a future-tense plan made with someone you love.

They model possibility. Watching a man your age laugh that hard, lean into a turn on a Vespa, pull out his phone to show a stranger pictures from a museum he was genuinely excited about — that says something. It says: life is still worth living fully. That’s not inspiration. That’s hope, demonstrated.

They remember together. The stories they told each other — the shorthand, the interruptions, the laughing before the punchline even landed — those shared memories aren’t just nostalgia. They are proof that a shared past exists, which means a shared future is possible. Memory, it turns out, is one of hope’s quieter engines.

And here is the part that I keep coming back to: their joy wasn’t private. My wife and I could feel it from the table next to them. It radiated. Joy, when it’s this deep and this old, doesn’t stay contained.

Here’s my slightly unpopular take: we’ve overcomplicated friendship. We talk about “building community” and “investing in relationships” as though they’re projects to manage. But these men didn’t architect anything. They just kept going. They showed up the next year, and the year after that, and forty-five years later they were on Vespas in Tuscany arguing over who had the better picture of a museum and it was the most alive I’d seen anyone look in a long time.

Hope isn’t something you manufacture. Sometimes it lives in the person who still calls you by the nickname you had at twenty-five.

Today’s song: “With a Little Help from My Friends” — Joe Cocker

…because nothing else comes close

A question for you

Who is the person in your life that has known you the longest — and when did you last tell them, out loud, what that friendship has meant to you? Drop a name or a memory in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What if one of the most enduring symbols of hope on Earth is a steel globe in Queens, New York — and most people have never once stopped to think about what it means?

I found myself thinking about this in Milan, of all places.

I was on a tour of the city with a brilliantly knowledgeable guide, surrounded by people from all over the world. Different countries, different cultures, different stories — and one thing in common: we all spoke English. A group of strangers, pulled together by curiosity and a shared language, moving through one of the world’s most beautiful cities in something that felt, if I’m honest, like hope made visible.

Then I saw the t-shirt.

One of the tour members was wearing a shirt printed with the iconic Unisphere — the massive steel globe built for the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York. The world’s largest model globe: 120 feet in diameter, 140 feet tall, 700,000 pounds of steel reaching toward the sky. Sixty-two years later, it still stands.

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The 1964 World’s Fair was built at the height of the Cold War, and its official theme was Peace Through Understanding. Over 51 million people walked through those gates. Hope, it turns out, draws a crowd.

Standing in Milan, looking at that globe on a stranger’s chest, I was pulled back immediately — to the Fair, to Disney’s pavilion, to the moment a boat ride quietly changed the way I saw the world.

“It’s a Small World After All.”

Disney introduced that ride at the 1964 World’s Fair as a tribute to UNICEF. Hundreds of Audio-Animatronic children representing every corner of the earth, all singing the same song. The message wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. Peace. Unity. Our shared humanity.

I was young when I first rode it. But I’ve carried that message ever since.

Here’s what I believe, and I’ll say it plainly:

Hope isn’t naive.

Hope is one of the most rigorous things a human being can practice.

The hope embedded in that 1964 World’ Fair — that people from every nation could come together, find common ground, recognize themselves in each other — wasn’t idealism. It was a wager. A bet that connection is stronger than division.

Standing in Milan, surrounded by strangers who became, for one afternoon, something closer to neighbors, I thought: the wager is still paying off.

Hope doesn’t always look like a monument. Sometimes it’s a t-shirt. Sometimes it’s a tour group. Sometimes it’s a boat ride you took six decades ago that never quite left you.

What’s a moment — with a stranger, on a trip, or somewhere completely unexpected — when the world suddenly felt smaller and more hopeful than you thought? Drop it in the comments. I read every one.

🎵 Today’s Song: “It’s A Small World Afterall” — Disney
Some songs aren’t just songs. They’re evidence.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

Here’s something that quietly broke my brain: the summer solstice — the longest, brightest day of the year — is also the exact moment the sun begins its retreat.

Peak light. And then, immediately, less.

I kept turning that over. Because for thousands of years, across every culture, humans have looked at that same paradox and chosen to celebrate. Not mourn. Not brace. Celebrate. Why?

A few weeks ago, the summer solstice arrived — the moment the Earth’s axis tilts closest to the sun, giving us our longest day. “Solstice” comes from the Latin sol sistere: the sun standing still. For one brief moment, it pauses. Then turns.

Here’s the surprising part: researchers studying psychological resilience have found that one of the strongest predictors of hope isn’t optimism — it’s what they call pattern trust. The deep, embodied belief that cycles hold. That what has returned before will return again.

Ancient people didn’t have the science. But they had the pattern. They watched the light diminish all the way through winter, and then — right on schedule — watched it come back. And somewhere in that rhythm, they found something more durable than happiness.

They found faith in the structure of things.

Hope isn’t about having the most light. It’s about trusting that light follows a pattern you can count on.

That’s what the solstice gives us, I think. Not a guarantee of good times. Just evidence — delivered annually, punctually — that the world has an order to it. That the dark doesn’t win permanently. That the turning always comes.

I began to explore this a few weeks ago, and here is what I learned: hope rarely lives at the peak. It lives in the turning.

Today’s Song: “Here Comes the Sun” — The Beatles

What’s something in your life — a season, a rhythm, a ritual — that reminds you the turning always comes? Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What do a French revolution and a wedding have in common?

Both begin with someone deciding — against all odds, against all reason — that something better is possible.

Today is Bastille Day. It is also my wedding anniversary. And I’ve been sitting with the strange, beautiful fact that these two events share the same date — because I think they share the same soul.

Here is something most people don’t know about the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789: when the crowd broke through those fortress walls, there were only seven prisoners inside.

Seven.

The revolution wasn’t really about freeing captives. It was about dismantling a symbol — proof that no wall, however thick, can hold hope back once people decide they’ve had enough of fear. Psychologists call this “agency thinking” — the belief that a path forward exists and that you are the one capable of walking it. It is, research confirms, the single most powerful predictor of resilience.

The French understood this without the research. They stormed the gates anyway.

I got married on a day like this. Hot. Vivid. The kind of day that burns itself into memory.

What I remember most isn’t the heat. It’s the feeling — that specific electricity of standing in a garden full of people you love, making a promise that this person will always have someone in their corner. That the pursuit of whatever they choose to become will never be a solo endeavor.

That promise has held. Every major decision in our marriage has been mutual. Easy, even — not because life has been easy, but because we’ve always been facing the same direction.

That is the quiet revolution most people miss: hope is not just a feeling. It is a structural decision.

You build it into the architecture of your life, or you don’t.

We built it in on a very hot day, surrounded by friends and family, with no idea how well it would hold. It has held beautifully.

The Bastille fell because ordinary people chose — collectively — to believe the future could be different from the past. A marriage holds for the same reason.

Both are acts of defiance against despair.

Both require you to show up before you’re certain it will work.

Both are, at their core, a bet on the person standing next to you.

I am a very lucky person. I know this. And on this day — every year — I am reminded that luck isn’t passive. It grows in the soil of the commitments you keep.

“The revolution doesn’t happen when the wall comes down. It happens the moment someone decides to walk toward it.”

🎵 Today’s Song: “La Vie en Rose” — Lady Gaga

(French for “life in pink” — seeing life through rose-colored glasses. On Bastille Day, with love on the line, it doesn’t get more fitting.)

Today’s question

What is the one decision — or promise — you’ve made in your life that has held up better than you ever expected? Drop it below.

And if today’s dose gave you something to hold onto, share it with someone who could use a little hope right now.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What if the most hopeful experiments in human history aren’t happening in Silicon Valley or Scandinavian policy labs — but in a country of 1.4 billion people figuring it out, loudly and in real time?

I’ve been sitting with that question this week.

And first: a warm welcome to every member of our hopeful community joining us from India. You are part of something spanning 65 countries now, and today’s dose is for you — and because of you.

Here are five things happening on the subcontinent right now that I keep returning to:

1. The sun is rising — literally

India recently crossed 100 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, making it the third-largest solar power country on earth. The Bhadla Solar Park in Rajasthan — the world’s largest — sits in a desert that once had nothing to offer but heat. Now it powers millions of homes. A country that once feared energy scarcity is quietly becoming one of the world’s renewable energy leaders. What once looked like a liability (abundant sun, vast land) turned out to be the asset all along.

2. India touched the moon’s south pole — and then got to work

In August 2023, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 became the first mission in history to land on the lunar south pole. No other nation had done it. What moves me most isn’t the achievement — it’s what came after: a generation of Indian children who watched it live decided, in that moment, that space was theirs too. Hope travels fast when it has a landing site.

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3. The payments revolution nobody talks about enough

Here’s the research finding I can’t stop sharing: India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) now accounts for roughly 46% of all real-time digital transactions on earth. More than Visa, Mastercard, and every Western fintech platform combined. In under a decade, India brought hundreds of millions of people — many who had never held a bank account — into the formal financial world. They didn’t copy anyone. They built something new. And now Singapore, France, UAE, and others are adopting it.

4. 90 million women decided to become each other’s banks

India’s Self-Help Group movement is one of the most quietly extraordinary things happening anywhere. Over 90 million women, organized into nearly 12 million small collectives, pooling savings, making micro-loans, and building economic independence from the ground up. These aren’t NGO projects — they’re neighbor-to-neighbor networks that governments eventually had to catch up to. When people ask me where grassroots hope actually lives, I point here.

5. A sports nation is waking up

Neeraj Chopra became India’s first Olympic gold medalist in track and field in 2021. Since then, something has loosened. Girls wrestling in Haryana. Para-athletes winning medals at the Asian Games. A badminton culture producing world-beaters. A country long defined by cricket is discovering that it has athletes everywhere — waiting for permission to believe.

🎵 Today’s Song: “Kun Faya Kun” — A.R. Rahman, Javed Ali & Mohit Chauhan

A song about surrender, transcendence, and the quiet certainty that something good is already here. Play it while you sit with today’s five.

The next chapter of human hope will not be written in the places that already have everything.

It will be written by the places that decided to build it anyway.

India is building.

What’s one thing you’ve seen or experienced in India — or from someone you know there — that made you think, “yes, people are still figuring it out together”? Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed for you, send it to someone who needs it.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

What if the thing you reach for when everything feels like too much is actually wiring your brain for optimism?

Not in the pop-science “chocolate makes you happy” way. In a deeper, stranger way.

The science

Researchers at Princeton found that sugar activates the same dopamine pathways as social bonding and music. Not just the eating of it — the anticipation. Your brain lights up before the first bite, in the same region that fires when you believe something good is about to happen. Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule. It’s the possibility molecule.

Here’s what I think that means: sugar doesn’t create hope. But it clears the road for it.

Hope might not be a mindset. It might be a metabolism.

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When your blood sugar crashes, so does your ability to imagine a better outcome. Studies on judicial decision-making show judges rule more harshly before lunch. Negotiators make worse deals by mid-afternoon. The brain running on empty is a brain that defaults to threat — not possibility.

We’ve been told sugar is the enemy. But maybe before we demonize the thing that lights up our neurons the same way love does, we should ask what it’s actually doing: keeping the lights on long enough for hope to walk through the door.

That’s why grandmothers offered cake first and talked second. That’s why every tradition of welcome involves something sweet. They knew, without the research, that you can’t build hope in a body that feels depleted.

Feed people first. Then show them the door marked possibility.

Today’s Song: “Sweet Thing” — Van Morrison

Warm, pastoral, quietly euphoric. Matches your voice perfectly — grounded but full of wonder. The title does the work without being on the nose.

Today’s question

What’s the one dish that takes you straight back to feeling like everything is going to be okay — and who made it for you? Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose gave you something, share it with someone who could use a little sweetness.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

I’m on holiday for three weeks, collecting hopeful thoughts to share when I return. In the interim, here is a DDH written on April 5, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

Why do certain paintings—silent, unmoving—somehow make people feel more alive?

Across centuries, people have returned to the same works of art not just for beauty, but for something deeper: reassurance. Not the easy kind. The earned kind. The kind that meets you where you are and quietly insists—there is still something here.

Here are ten paintings people consistently turn to for hope—and why they endure:

1. The Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh (1889)

Painted from an asylum window, the sky churns—but it doesn’t collapse. It breathes. The village sits quietly below, held by something vast and alive.
Hope, here, is the idea that the universe isn’t indifferent—it’s electric.

2. Water Lilies – Claude Monet (1896–1926)

Monet painted these while losing his eyesight. The softness isn’t a flaw—it’s the point.
Beauty doesn’t require perfect clarity to exist.

3. Christina’s World – Andrew Wyeth (1948)

A woman reaches toward a distant home. She couldn’t walk.
But the painting isn’t about limitation—it’s about will.
The reach itself becomes hope.

4. The Gleaners – Jean-François Millet (1857)

Three women gather what’s been left behind.
Hope lives in dignity—the quiet insistence that unseen work still matters.

5. The Creation of Adam – Michelangelo (1512)

Two hands, almost touching.
That gap—just before connection—is where possibility lives.
Everything is about to begin.

6. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte – Georges Seurat (1886)

Thousands of tiny dots resolve into something whole—if you step back.
Hope is sometimes perspective.

7. Nighthawks – Edward Hopper (1942)

Lonely. Quiet. Honest.
And yet—that light in the diner.
It says: even isolation is shared.

8. The Potato Eaters – Vincent van Gogh (1885)

A family gathered around a simple meal.
There is something sacred in shared effort—and shared presence.

9. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog – Caspar David Friedrich (1818)

A figure stands above a vast unknown.
Not overwhelmed—steadfast.
Hope is standing at the edge… and not stepping back.

10. American Progress – John Gast (1872)

Complicated in history—but unmistakable in belief.
The idea that things can move forward. That light can spread.
Hope, in its most ambitious form.

What ties these together isn’t perfection. It’s persistence.

Van Gogh was suffering. Monet was going blind. Christina Olson couldn’t walk.
And still—something in them reached for light.

Hope isn’t found in ease. It’s revealed in endurance.

Psychologists sometimes refer to “prospection”—the human ability to imagine a better future—as one of our most powerful survival tools. These paintings do exactly that. They don’t just show us what is. They help us feel what could be.

And maybe that’s why they last.

Question:

What’s one image—painting, photograph, or even a moment—you’ve seen that made you feel, even briefly, that things were going to be okay?

Please share your hopeful stories in the chat below. And share this short missive with someone who might even subscribe to our Hopeful Community.

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

I’m on holiday for three weeks, collecting hopeful thoughts to share when I return. In the interim, here is a DDH written on April 7, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

Someone asked me the other day a deceptively simple question:

Do lottery tickets give people hope?

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And then, almost as an aside:

Are lotteries even that common around the world?

The answer surprised them.

Roughly half the countries on Earth run some form of lottery. You’ll find them in places as different as the United States and Canada… across United Kingdom, France, and Spain… throughout China, India, and Japan… and in places like South Africa, Kenya, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Different cultures. Different economies. Different belief systems.

And yet—the same small ritual.

A ticket. A number. A possibility.

So… is that hope?

Psychologists have a term called the “anticipatory reward response.” It turns out that the brain often releases more dopamine in anticipation of a reward than in receiving it. In other words, the feeling of maybe can be more powerful than the feeling of having.

That matters.

Because a lottery ticket isn’t really about the odds. Most people understand—at least intuitively—that the odds are extraordinarily low.

It’s about permission.

Permission to imagine a different version of your life.

A brief, inexpensive moment where the constraints of today loosen their grip on tomorrow.

And here’s the stance I’ve come to:

Lotteries don’t create hope. They reveal how deeply we need it.

That distinction matters.

Because real, durable hope—the kind that carries you through difficulty—is built on agency, effort, connection, and meaning. A ticket doesn’t build those things.

But it does something else.

It reminds us that we are wired to look forward.

That even in uncertainty, people everywhere—across continents, languages, and circumstances—are willing to invest in possibility.

Even if just for a day.

Hope isn’t always rational. But it’s almost always human.

So no, a lottery ticket won’t change most lives.

But the act of buying one?

It quietly affirms something powerful:

That people, everywhere, still believe tomorrow could be different.

Today’s Song: “Waiting on the World to Change” — John Mayer

A question for you

When was the last time you allowed yourself to imagine a better version of your life—no matter how unlikely—and what did that vision look like?

Drop it in the comments. And if today’s dose gave you something to think about, share it with someone who might need a little possibility.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

I’m on holiday for three weeks, collecting hopeful thoughts to share when I return. In the interim, here is a DDH written on March 4, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

Where does hope go when someone you love is just… under the weather?

My wife isn’t that sick—just under the weather.
But even “not that sick” changes the day.

The house gets quieter. Plans get softer around the edges. And my attention narrows in a good way: How can I make this easier for her? What would feel comforting right now?

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Here’s what surprised me:

Even minor illnesses have a way of tugging on the same big human questions.

If it’s “just a cold” (or whatever today is), why does it still feel tender—like the day needs more care than usual?
And where, exactly, is hope in that?

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The obvious hope (and the quieter one)

The obvious hope is simple: I hope she feels better soon.

But there’s a quieter kind of hope hiding in plain sight:

In small moments, care is hope with sleeves rolled up.

A mug of tea. A warmed blanket. A run to the pharmacy. Taking something off her plate without making it a speech. Letting the day be “good enough” instead of perfectly productive.

When someone’s under the weather, you don’t need heroics. You need tenderness.
And tenderness is a form of hope because it says: You matter, even on low-power mode.

One surprising fact to anchor today

A major review of research across 148 studies (over 308,000 people) found that people with stronger social relationships had about a 50% higher likelihood of survival and recovery than those with weaker relationships.

That’s obviously not a “tea cures colds” claim. It’s something deeper: connection measurably supports health over time.
So when you show up with small care—especially consistently—you’re not only being nice. You’re reinforcing the kind of belonging that bodies respond to.

A small stance (because it helps)

Here’s my stance today:

Hope isn’t the same as pretending everything is fine.

Real hope says: It’s okay to slow down.
It says: Rest counts.
It says: We can be gentle with today and still trust tomorrow.

Sometimes the most hopeful thing you can do is stop negotiating with reality and simply meet it with kindness.

Where hope hides when someone is under the weather

I’ve noticed it in a few places:

• In the permission slip. “You don’t have to power through. You can just be cozy and recover.”

• In the micro-wins. “You laughed once.” “Your appetite came back a little.” “Your voice sounds better.”

• In the teamwork. You quietly cover a few tasks, and the day stays steady.

• In the reminder that love is practical. It’s not only feelings—it’s doing.

Hope is love that notices.

Today’s Song: “Better Together”—Jack Johnson

A very specific question for you

What’s the smallest thing someone has done for you when you were under the weather that made you feel genuinely cared for?
Be specific—what was it, and why did it land?

Drop it in the comments. I have a feeling your answer will give someone else a script for kindness.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

Read in 50 states in the US and 66 countries throughout the World.

I’m on holiday for three weeks, collecting hopeful thoughts to share when I return. In the interim, here is a DDH written on February 2, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

No multitasking. No performance. No agenda beyond this simple act: placing words on a page for a community built around hope. And in that quiet, something shifted. Not because my day suddenly got easier, but because my mind had a place to land.

Silence can be a catalyst for hope because it gives us back what busyness steals: perspective. When we’re constantly in motion, our attention is rented out to everything external—requests, schedules, other people’s needs. But a brief moment alone returns ownership of our attention to us. In that space, we remember we’re more than our to-do list. We can hear our own thoughts again. We can feel what we actually feel. We can notice what we’ve been carrying—and, sometimes, set it down.

Being alone for a moment also restores hope in a very practical way: it calms the nervous system. Quiet tells the body, you’re safe right now. And when the body feels safe, the mind becomes more creative, more open, more able to imagine a better next step. Hope doesn’t always arrive like fireworks. Sometimes it arrives like a deep exhale.

So if you’re running hard today, I’ll offer this gentle reminder: even a small pocket of stillness counts. A few minutes in the car before you go inside. A walk without your phone. Sitting with a cup of tea and letting the day stop chasing you. Silence isn’t empty—it’s where hope often begins to speak.

Today’s Song: 🎶 The Sound of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)

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A Daily Dose of Hope — one short reflection each day about where hope lives in our world.

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