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Every day I look at a color separation of this image. Why? It hangs in my study. Since it has been there for such a long time, I would give it a fleeting glance. Today, I realize that the “March of Progress” may just be one of the most iconic pictures of hope ever created.

I know that you’ve seen a reproduction of it. Seemingly everyone has. Depending upon which “version” of it you’ve seen, you have viewed either 6, 10 or 15 “individuals” walking. They start hunched over and end up upright. The appearance is that as a group, they are striding forward. Most people don’t know its real name. Originally it was “The Road to Homo Sapiens” but it is more commonly known as the “March of Progress.”

It is one of the most reproduced and parodied images in the history of science illustration, having been used in company logos, album covers, political cartoons, fitness ads, and internet memes. The essence of it has been borrowed now for over sixty years. When I tried to research how many times it has been parodied, the best answer I could find, online was, “into the thousands if you count every meme and ad riff, though nobody's kept a real tally.”

I’m guessing that somewhere in this hopeful community of ours (spread across 96 countries now), I’d bet a good number of you have looked at this exact image or a parody of it at some point in your life without knowing where it came from.

March of Progress’ History

Here’s where it came from, and it is personal. The man who painted “The March of Progress” was my father-in-law, Rudolph Franz Zallinger. Time-Life Books commissioned him to do it in 1965, for a volume called “Early Man,” part of their Life Nature Library series. Little known fact: what Rudy handed in wasn’t a timeline at all. It was a set of individual plates — fifteen separate figures, each one researched and drawn on its own. Rudy wanted them to be understood as a family, spread out across branches (like a tree) and not lined up in a parade.

Time-Life didn’t see it that way. The paleoanthropologist who authored Early Man, F. Clark Howell, pushed to arrange the figures shoulder to shoulder, marching toward modern man in a straight line. Rudy pushed back as he didn’t think that was the correct way to represent things. Frankly, he was absolutely correct. Human evolution isn’t a relay race where one species hands off the baton to the next. It’s closer to a family tree with a lot of branches growing at once. Many of the individuals in that image lived at the same time, on different continents, never crossing paths. What became “March of Progress” is, biologically speaking, more of a family reunion photo than a finish line.

Another set of facts. Look closely at the original and you’ll notice some parts of each figure are shaded darker than the rest. That is not meant to be a decoration. The darkened area was where an actual fossil had been recovered for that individual. The rest of the “picture” was built by Rudy using the best science available to him at the time. He actually worked with what researchers had actually dug up. Rudy also gave each figure the tools of his own era; the specific implement that individual would plausibly have carried and used. None of those tools made it into the final representation we all know. The editors wanted strong memorable statement, which is exactly what they got. The “March of Progress” has been called one of the most reproduced images in the history of science illustration, and it’s still being copied and mocked more than sixty years later.

So, back to the original question. Does Progress Equal Hope?

I don’t think the answer is clean, and I’m not going to pretend it is. The picture itself is at least a simplification. Real change doesn’t move in a straight line, upward and to the right, one clean step after another. Anyone who’s tried to lose weight, or change any behavior already knows that. Progress loops back on itself. It stalls. Sometimes it looks like regression for a long stretch before it looks like anything else.

Yet, the reason this image grabbed the whole world, and never let go, isn’t that it was scientifically precise. It’s that it told a story people needed — that where we start isn’t where we have to end up. That’s not biology. That’s psychology, and it’s a real thing. Researchers who study motivation will tell you that people don’t sustain effort toward goals they can’t picture reaching. You need some image, even an oversimplified one, of the distance covered and the distance left. Rudy’s fifteen honest, complicated plates might have been better science. But the six-figure march is what people needed to see to believe that where they stood wasn’t the end of the story.

So maybe progress doesn’t equal hope in any tidy, provable sense. But hope needs something to point toward, and progress is generally a messy, non-linear, three-steps-forward-two-steps-back approach; the best evidence that we’ve got motion. I’d argue the family tree is more accurate. I’d also argue the “March of Progress” is more useful on the days you need to believe you can still get somewhere. Both can be true, even though they’re not the same picture.

You are not standing still, even when it feels that way. That's hope, moving quietly.

Question

Where in your life does it feel like you’re moving in circles, but might actually be climbing?

Today’s Song: “Walk On” — U2.

U2 actually created their own versio of the “March of Progress,” which they displayed in one of their concert series.

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 96 countries throughout the World.

Attributions

• “March of Progress” (also titled “The Road to Homo Sapiens”) was painted by Rudolph Franz Zallinger for Early Man, F. Clark Howell and the Editors of Time-Life Books, Life Nature Library series, Time-Life Books, 1965. — Wikipedia: March of Progress

• The linear arrangement of Zallinger’s individual plates is credited to paleoanthropologist Elwyn Simons, who advised on the book; Zallinger himself favored a non-linear, family-tree presentation. — On the Origins of “The March of Progress,” Washington University ProSPER; Grokipedia: March of Progress

• The scientific consensus that human evolution is a branching, non-linear process, with multiple hominid species living concurrently, rather than a single-file lineage. — IFLScience: The Famous “March of Progress” Image Is Wildly Wrong; Genetics Unzipped: The Mythical March of Progress

• Details on the darker-shaded fossil-evidence areas of each figure and the era-accurate tools depicted are drawn from research done by Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Two members of our hopeful community have had different, yet strikingly similar, experiences. Both were riding. One was riding a horse, the other a bike. Their stories are stellar examples of why you need hope — and determination — to both get better and get back in the saddle.

Rider number one loves horses. She spends most of her waking hours at the barn, caring for and riding her horse. In a recent competition, she and her horse went over a jump. The horse made it clean; she didn’t, and broke her heel. Once the initial pain subsided, she was placed in a boot — about three months ago now — and told to keep it immobile. She was hopeful and determined to get better as fast as possible. But heels don’t always cooperate, and she’s still in the boot, waiting to start physical therapy. Heels are simply slow to heal. Even so, she remains determined to heal quickly and get back on her horse. I know she will — the lesson here is that some things just take time and patience.

Rider number two lives to ride her bike, taking short and long rides with friends all over the world. On a recent ride, she was climbing a steep hill when her gears seized, sending her flying forward onto the side of the road and into a gravel ditch. Her co-rider was a mile behind and arrived to find her bleeding. He helped revive her, then helped her make the final ride back to the car — a mere 33 miles away. It turned out she’d torn her meniscus, and she’s now in physical therapy. No 200-mile ride for her this weekend. When I spoke with her recently about the injury, she said it’s hope and determination carrying her through the process — so that she, too, can get back in the saddle.

What the Research Says

It turns out both riders’ instincts are backed by real science. Hope and determination aren’t just nice sentiments during recovery — they measurably shape how well and how fast people heal.

Hope predicts better outcomes, not just better moods.

Studies of patients in rehabilitation for orthopedic surgery, stroke, and other injuries have found that hope, measured early in recovery, predicts better functional outcomes later on. Patients with higher psychological resilience are more likely to stick with their treatment plans and make steady physical progress, while those without it are more likely to disengage from rehab, which tends to mean longer recoveries and worse results. In other words, the mindset our riders are leaning on isn’t wishful thinking — it’s a documented predictor of how well they’ll actually recover.

The throughline: recovery from injuries like these isn’t purely a matter of tissue and time. The mental posture patients bring to rehab — hope, resilience, confidence — actually changes the outcome. Both of these riders are doing exactly what the research says works.

Question

When was the last time you had an injury and relied on hope, resilience and confidence to heal, along with following the appropriate protocol? Place it in the chat.

Today’s song: “Teenage Warrior” Little Feat

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

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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 94 countries throughout the World.

Sources:

• Hope predicts positive functional role outcomes in acute rehabilitation populations

• The mediating effects of hope on psychological resilience in stroke patients

• The Role of Optimism and Psychosocial Factors in Athletes’ Recovery From ACL Injury

• Resilience and pain catastrophizing as predictors of post-operative outcomes

There’s a reason you don’t reach for a salad when your world falls apart. You reach for the thing that feels like hope.

Psychologists have a name for it: social surrogacy. A 2011 study out of the University at Buffalo (Troisi & Gabriel, Psychological Science) had people write about a fight with a close friend, then eat a comfort food from their childhood. Afterward, they felt less lonely — measurably so, almost as if a friend had actually shown up. Comfort food didn’t just fill a stomach. It stood in for a relationship, and relationships are where a lot of our hope gets stored.

Last year, in the piece on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I made the case that food sits on the bottom rung — the foundation everything else gets built on. But this study suggests it’s doing more than holding the pyramid up. It’s smuggling hope into the floors above it too, the ones about love and belonging that are supposed to come later.

A bowl of soup can’t pay your rent or heal a friendship. But apparently, your brain doesn’t always know that. It tastes hope anyway.

Comfort food gets a bad reputation in a culture obsessed with clean eating and discipline. But treating a hard day with a bowl of your mom’s soup, or whatever yours is, might be one of the more psychologically sound things you can do.

Hope doesn’t always arrive as a plan or a pep talk. Sometimes hope arrives reheated, in a pot, tasting exactly like it did when someone else was taking care of you.

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 below.

Today’s song: “You’ve Got a Friend” — Carole King

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 91 countries throughout the World.

I weigh too much. It has been an issue for a long while — and one of the major contributing factors to my heart attack and subsequent flatlining eight years ago.

Following doctor’s orders, I became a vegan, exercise fairly regularly, get massage treatments, and meditate. Right after my heart attack, I lost 40 pounds being very compliant to all of the above. Yet six years in, I started to eat too much — both in the evening and once I began wandering back out into the world again. You see, it is tough to be a vegan. And I found myself eating all kinds of dark chocolate and breads, all loaded with sugar. Sugar is incredibly addictive, and yes, my inclination has been to migrate right to it. So I eat too much of it.

Even though my blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol are exceptional, I weigh too much. So a couple of years ago, I was prescribed a GLP-1, which shall go unnamed. After my resting heart rate hit 132, the folks in the emergency room told me to using stop it. I complied. Then I was prescribed another GLP-1+ (again, unnamed). In about a year, I lost three to four pounds. When I moved to a third GLP-1++, I was given the baby dose for two months. That’s when I learned that GLP-1+ had actually been working — just to keep me from gaining. Why do I say that? On the baby dose of the third GLP-1++, I gained 10 pounds.

Now I’m on the official “weight loss” dose of GLP-1++, and it seems to be working — four pounds down in the last week.

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So why am I telling you all of this? Because I was losing hope. And hey — it returned this past week. I took my second official weight-loss dose yesterday, and I know I will lose weight. Frankly, my life depends on it. And you, members of this hopeful community, would possibly miss your Daily Dose of Hope if I weren’t around to write it 😉. I will succeed, and I will be patient in doing so.

Hope needs something to grab onto

Researchers who study hope — starting with the psychologist Charles Snyder — break it into three parts: a goal, a pathway to get there, and agency, which is the belief that you’re the one who can actually walk that pathway. Agency is the part that says “I can do this,” not just “this is possible.” It’s the difference between watching a road exist and believing your own two feet can carry you down it.

That’s exactly what happened to me over the last two years. I had a goal the whole time. I never lacked pathways, either — I had three different medications, a vegan diet, exercise, massage, meditation. What I lost, somewhere between the 132 heart rate and the 10-pound gain on a “working” drug, was agency. I stopped believing I was the one steering this. It started to feel like something was happening to me rather than something I was doing.

The four pounds this past week didn’t just move a number on a scale. They handed agency back to me. And that’s what hope researchers keep finding in study after study: hope isn’t just wishful thinking, it’s fuel for actually adhering to treatment, sticking with hard behavior change, and recovering from illness. People with more agency thinking take more preventive action and adjust better when things go sideways. I’m living proof of both halves of that — the losing and the regaining.

I will succeed, and I will be patient in doing so. If you are on any type of a similar journey, there is great hope that you, too, will succeed!

Today’s Song: “Rise Up” by Andra Day.

Question For You

When did you have hope about something, only to have it dashed — and then have it return? Please share in the comments below.

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.

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.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
This was built for the days when it doesn’t.
For $5/month, upgrade to receive the full daily essays.

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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.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
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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.

Share

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 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 17, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

What if the very technology that unsettles us… is also quietly teaching us how to hope better?

Today, when people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation often swings between awe and anxiety.

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Will it replace us?

Will it mislead us?

Will it outpace our ability to control it?

All fair questions.

But there is another question—one we ask less often:

Where, exactly, is the hope in all of this?

A surprising truth about intelligence (human or artificial)

Researchers studying problem-solving have found something fascinating:

Progress accelerates when feedback loops shorten.

In simple terms, the faster you can try something, learn, adjust, and try again—the faster you improve.

Artificial intelligence—especially large language models (LLMs) and emerging “world models”—does exactly that. At scale.

That’s not just a technological breakthrough.

It’s a hope engine.

Where hope lives in LLMs

Large language models—systems that can read, write, reason, and converse—offer something profoundly human:

They lower the barrier to expression and understanding.

• A student anywhere in the world can ask questions without fear of judgment

• An entrepreneur can prototype ideas instantly

• A caregiver can find words when they don’t have any left

In essence:

LLMs give people a second brain when their first one is tired, overwhelmed, or stuck.

The challenge

They can hallucinate.

They can mislead.

They can reflect biases in the data they were trained on.

The hope

We are already learning how to improve them—through better training data, real-time verification, human-in-the-loop systems, and transparency.

And here’s the deeper point:

Every flaw we uncover is not just a risk—it’s a roadmap for improvement.

That’s hope in action:

Not perfection, but iteration.

Where hope lives in world models

World models—AI systems that simulate environments, predict outcomes, and “understand” how things work—are even more quietly revolutionary.

They allow us to ask:

• What happens if we change this climate variable?

• What happens if we redesign this city?

• What happens if we intervene earlier in disease?

They let us practice the future before we live it.

The challenge

They can oversimplify reality.

They can encode incorrect assumptions.

They can create false confidence if we trust them blindly.

The hope

We don’t have to choose between blind trust and rejection.

We can pair simulation with humility.

We can improve models with better data, interdisciplinary input, and constant testing against the real world.

And perhaps most importantly:

We can use them not to predict one future—but to explore many better ones.

A stance worth considering

Here’s something that may sound counterintuitive:

Hope and intelligence are not separate forces—intelligence, properly guided, is one of hope’s most powerful tools.

But only if we stay engaged.

Because AI will not decide whether it becomes a force for hope.

We will.

The deeper layer

There’s something almost poetic here.

We have built machines that learn by:

• Trying

• Failing

• Adjusting

• Trying again

Sound familiar?

It’s the same process by which humans grow, heal, and hope.

In teaching machines to iterate, we are being reminded how to live.

Hope is not that AI will be perfect—it’s that, like us, it can keep getting better.

A closing thought

Perhaps the real promise of artificial intelligence is not that it replaces human potential…

…but that it reveals how expandable human potential has always been.

A question for you

When you think about artificial intelligence—LLMs, simulations, all of it—

what is one specific way it could make your life, or someone else’s life, meaningfully better in the next year?

Drop it below.

Today’s Song: “Fix You”—Coldplay

And if today’s dose gave you even a small sense of possibility, share it with someone who could use a little more hope in their future.

If today’s dose gave you hope, share it with someone who could use a brighter view of the future.

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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 I told you that this past week — three separate medical issues, three different specialists — left me more hopeful than I’ve been in months?

Stick with me.

First, something felt off with my teeth. Not dramatic, just off. I texted my dentist immediately — we call each other “cuz,” no relation, but we’ve fooled more than a few people — and days later I was in his chair. No novocaine. No drama. A minor repair, and a diagnosis: seasonal sinuses. I exhaled. I knew that would pass.

Then my knee. Hit it while on a train, aggravated by cycling. I reached out to my orthopedic surgeon — the one who knows knees the way a musician knows his instrument — and the appointment is coming.

Then my vision. Was it my glasses? The weight loss medication? My ophthalmologist — thorough, patient, unhurried — told me there had been a worsening in my eyes’ condition since January 2025. But here’s the thing: new glasses could fix it. Completely.

And that’s the moment it clicked.

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Hope isn’t the absence of something being wrong. Hope is knowing the right person is in your corner.

Psychologists call this perceived competence — the belief that someone with genuine expertise is attending to your problem. Research from the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that patients who feel genuinely heard and understood by their physicians show measurably better outcomes, not just psychologically, but physiologically. The trust itself is therapeutic. Jerome Groopman, in his landmark work The Anatomy of Hope, argues that hope has a biological signature — it triggers endorphins and enkephalins, natural painkillers that can literally alter how we experience illness.

Which means my dentist-cuz, my knee surgeon, my kind ophthalmologist — they weren’t just treating my body. They were administering hope.

I didn’t spiral. I didn’t catastrophize. I reached out, I showed up, and I trusted. And what I got back, every single time, was not a verdict but a path forward. The tooth is fine. The knee has a plan. The eyes have a fix. Three maladies. Three doors that opened instead of closed.

We tend to think of health problems as interruptions to our life. But what if they’re actually invitations — to trust, to reach out, to remember that we are not alone in our bodies?

That is a profound form of hope. One most of us overlook entirely.

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

(Because hope, most of the time, has a human face.)

Today’s question

Who is the one doctor, dentist, therapist, or healer who has given you the most hope — not just by treating you, but by making you feel like everything was going to be okay? Tell me their first name and what they said or did. Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed, share it with someone who’s been avoiding a call they need to make.

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 65 countries throughout the World.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
This was built for the days when it doesn’t.
For $5/month, upgrade to receive the full daily essays.

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What if the people the world calls “different” have quietly been showing us how to live all along?

This past week, I was talking with someone whose brother and sister are both autistic. She described them as “Level 1 functioning” — and she was emphatic about one thing: they give her genuine, daily, undeniable hope. That stopped me. I wanted to understand what she meant — what Level 1 autism actually is, what it means to live inside it, and how someone navigating it every day could become a source of light for the people around them. So I went looking. What I found reframed everything I thought I knew.

First, what is Level 1 autism?

Autism Spectrum Disorder is classified across three levels of support need. Level 1 — once called Asperger’s — means a person can largely function independently, but faces real, daily friction: social communication that doesn’t follow neurotypical patterns, deep sensory sensitivity, a strong need for routine and predictability. They feel things intensely. They often struggle to be understood. And they spend enormous energy navigating a world that wasn’t designed with them in mind.

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Here’s what the research found — and it’s worth sitting with.

A 2017 study published in the journal Autism discovered something that should have made bigger headlines: when autistic individuals were given written rather than face-to-face communication, their social cognition scores were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical peers. Read that again. The so-called “social deficit” in autism may not be a deficit at all — it may be a format mismatch. The world keeps insisting on one channel. Autistic people are often fluent in others.

Autistic people aren’t broken. They’re running different software on hardware the world hasn’t learned to support yet.

This reframe matters more than it might first appear. For most of the 20th century, the dominant lens on autism was deficit: what autistic people can’t do, can’t feel, can’t manage. That lens is finally cracking. Companies like SAP and Microsoft have built neurodiversity hiring programs — not as charity, but because they discovered that autistic employees were outperforming neurotypical peers in pattern recognition, sustained attention, and precision. Temple Grandin’s ability to think in pictures — once treated as a symptom to be managed — revolutionized the livestock industry. What looked like limitation turned out to be a different kind of architecture entirely.

The neurodiversity movement has made it scientifically and socially legitimate to ask a question that should have come sooner: what if this is a different operating system, not a broken one?

Here’s where I’ll take a stance

The deficit model of autism hasn’t just been wrong — it’s been costly. For decades, the entire project was to make autistic people fit a world that never once stopped to ask whether the world itself needed adjusting. The braver question — the more hopeful one — is what the neurotypical world has been missing, and who’s been quietly trying to show us.

The woman I spoke with understood this without needing the research. Her brother and sister don’t give her hope despite being autistic. They give her hope through it — through their particular honesty, their fierce loyalties, their ability to find beauty and meaning in things the rest of us scroll past. There’s something clarifying about spending time with someone who doesn’t perform their emotions, who means exactly what they say, and who notices what you’ve long since stopped noticing.

That’s not a tragedy dressed up as inspiration. That’s just what happens when a different kind of mind shows up fully.

Today’s Song: “Wonder” — Natalie Merchant

Written for a child born into difficulty, raised in wonder. If you’ve never listened to it, today is the day.

Hope isn’t reserved for the people who fit. Sometimes it comes most clearly from the ones who never tried to.

Think of someone in your life who sees the world differently than most people around them. What’s one thing they’ve shown you — or helped you notice — that you would have missed on your own? Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose landed, share it with someone who could use it.

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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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Every morning since my heart attack on March 12, 2018, the first thing I reach for isn’t my phone.

It’s my blood pressure cuff.

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Weight. Hours and quality of sleep. Blood pressure. Heart rate. Blood oxygen. Five numbers, measured before I speak to anyone or step outside. Five data points that confirm I’m doing this right—or remind me where I need to work harder.

I hope they’ll all be in range. But hope, I’ve learned, is only half of it.

The other half is the six-plus years of actions that make the hope credible.

Here’s where I am today: my sleep score consistently lands in the high 90s or a perfect 100. Blood pressure holds in the appropriate range, though on the lower end—something I watch carefully. Heart rate runs in the 50s to 60s, which tracks directly with my exercise habits. Blood oxygen sits between 96 and 98 percent. The one outlier is weight, which had migrated to a healthy range before creeping back up—too many carbohydrates, something I’m actively working to correct.

Five vital signs. Four in range. One still being earned back.

Here’s the science most people don’t know

A resting heart rate in the 50s isn’t just “good”—it’s a signal. Research published in the journal Heart found that every 10-beat increase in resting heart rate is associated with a 9% higher risk of cardiovascular death, even in people without existing heart disease. My resting rate in the 50s and 60s isn’t luck. It’s logged miles, discipline, and the daily choice to keep going.

A take I’ll stand behind

The romanticized version of hope—passive, wishful, soft—can actually work against you. What keeps people alive after a cardiac event isn’t optimism. It’s the willingness to show up for the numbers every morning, especially on the days the numbers push back.

I used to think hope and discipline were opposites. One felt emotional. The other felt hard. Six years of morning rituals have shown me they’re the same thing in different clothes.

Hope without action is a wish. Action without hope is just exhaustion. The place I’m trying to live is where the two become indistinguishable.

The lesson, if there is one: don’t wait for the vital signs to go wrong before you start caring about them. The window between “in range” and “not in range” is where your life actually happens—and hope is what gets you out of bed to check.

What’s the one daily habit you return to—not because it’s easy, but because it reminds you that you’re still fighting for something? Drop it in the comments. And if today’s dose landed, share it with someone who could use a reminder that the numbers are worth watching.

🎵 Today’s Song: “The Heart of Life” — John Mayer

“Pain throws your heart to the ground / Love turns the whole thing around / No, it won’t all go the way it should / But I know the heart of life is good.”

For anyone who has ever checked a number they were afraid to see—and kept going anyway.

Subscribe for your Daily Dose of Hope — delivered every morning, right when you need it.

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.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
This was built for the days when it doesn’t.
For $5/month, upgrade to receive the full daily essays.

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The Unintended Consequences of Too Many Satellites — and Where Hope Lives Anyway

Scientists have a name for the moment one satellite collision becomes ten thousand.

They call it the Kessler Syndrome — a chain reaction so complete that entire orbital bands become permanently unusable. No GPS. No weather satellites. No communications. No future space exploration. Not for decades. Possibly not ever.

And here’s what’s important to understand: we may already be past the trigger threshold at certain altitudes.

So where, exactly, is the hope?

To answer that honestly, we have to first sit with what the research actually shows. Because hope that skips past the hard part isn’t hope. It’s wishful thinking.

The Problem: A Question That Should Make Us All Pause

Someone asked me recently a simple question: “At what point do we reach saturation with the number of satellites in orbit?”

It stopped me. Because whatever the answer, I realized it was a perfect example of the need to do systems thinking — specifically: to pursue a clearly good goal (global connectivity, GPS, defense, scientific research), what are the unintended consequences of having too many satellites orbiting the earth?

So I did some research. Here is what I found.

At What Point Do We Reach Saturation?

The numeric threshold is roughly 100,000 active satellites before low Earth orbit (LEO) is fully saturated — but saturation isn’t uniform. Different orbital shells have different capacities, and some are already critically crowded.

The more meaningful threshold is the Kessler Syndrome trigger point — already breached at certain altitudes. The 520–1,000 km band has crossed the point where a single collision could start a self-sustaining debris cascade; once triggered, the affected shell becomes progressively unusable within years — not decades.¹

The practical timeline: At current launch rates, researchers expect LEO to hit hard saturation limits before 2050. SpaceX alone wants 42,000 Starlink satellites. Add Amazon’s Kuiper (~3,200), China’s Qianfan (~14,000), and other operators, and the math gets uncomfortable fast.²

The real wildcard

Rising CO₂ cools the upper atmosphere, reducing atmospheric drag — debris stays in orbit longer than predicted. Effective orbital capacity is shrinking even as we fill it faster.³

There’s no precise saturation number — some altitude bands are already at or past the tipping point. We just haven’t had the triggering collision yet.

The Climate Dimension

Saturation isn’t the only concern — launching satellites and deorbiting them carries an environmental cost increasingly hard to ignore.

Rocket soot (black carbon). Rocket fuel combustion releases black carbon into the stratosphere — lingering far longer than ground-level emissions, with a warming effect roughly 540× greater per unit than soot from cars, ships, or power plants. At projected launch rates, stratospheric warming from black carbon alone could reach +1.5°C, with significant ozone depletion in the Northern Hemisphere.⁴

Satellite reentry pollution. When satellites deorbit and burn up, they vaporize metals — aluminum, copper, lead, lithium — into the mesosphere. Starlink satellites alone contribute an estimated 500+ kg of incinerated material per day. Scientists describe the cumulative effect as an “unregulated geoengineering experiment.”⁵

The share is growing. A 2026 UCL study projects Starlink-style constellations will drive 42% of all space industry pollution by 2030.⁶

The surprising fact that reframed everything for me

The space debris removal market didn’t meaningfully exist five years ago. Today it’s valued at $200 million and projected to reach $750 million by 2030 — growing at 38% annually. Astroscale is launching a magnetic-docking debris capture mission this year. ESA’s ClearSpace-1 will physically grab and deorbit a defunct satellite adapter — the first time that’s ever been attempted. Researchers are simultaneously testing low-carbon, low-toxicity propellants designed to stop the black carbon problem at its source.⁷

Money following a problem is a signal. Capital at 38% annual growth is a loud one.

The Systems Thinking Takeaway

The question “how many satellites is too many?” sounds narrow. Pull on that thread and you get orbital debris cascades, stratospheric warming, metallic aerosol pollution, and the slow erosion of the commons we call outer space — all byproducts of goals (global connectivity, GPS, defense) most people consider unambiguously good.

That’s the nature of unintended consequences. They emerge from systems we didn’t fully model before we committed.

Where Hope Lives

Here’s the stance that might surprise you:

The Kessler Syndrome isn’t really a story about recklessness. It’s a story about reach — the gap between what we’re capable of building and what we’re capable of foreseeing. Every civilization in history has faced a version of this gap. The ones that endured learned to close it — not perfectly, not without cost, but enough.

What’s different now is that atmospheric scientists, orbital mechanics researchers, regulators, and climatologists are finally in the same conversation. The fact that scientists are calling this an “unregulated geoengineering experiment” in print is itself a turning point. Problems that can’t be named can’t be solved. This one now has a name.

And the deepest hope may be this: the same systems thinking that revealed this crisis is the exact tool that can prevent the next one. A culture that learns to ask “and then what?” before it launches — literally and figuratively — is a culture that can course-correct.

We didn’t fail to see the consequences. We failed to look for them. The hopeful part? Now we’re looking.

The window is narrow. But it is open.

Today’s question:

Think of a moment you watched something that seemed irreversibly broken start to come back — an ecosystem, a community, a relationship, a system. What was the exact moment you thought: this might actually work? Drop it in the comments. Those stories are the data points hope runs on.

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

🎵 Today’s Song: “Learning to Fly”—Pink Floyd

Because sometimes the most courageous thing is to float into the unknown and trust that ground control is paying attention.

If today’s dose gave you something to hold onto, pass it to someone who needs it. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, there’s a seat at this table with your name on 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 65 countries throughout the World.

Sources:

1. Kessler Syndrome: Crisis in Space Intensifies — The Debrief

2. Kessler Syndrome Alert: 5.5-Day Countdown — IEEE Spectrum

3. Climate Change Will Reduce the Number of Satellites That Can Safely Orbit — MIT News

4. Scientists Warn of Emissions Risks from Satellites — Yale E360

5. Satellite Megaconstellations: An Unregulated Geoengineering Experiment — Space.com

6. Starlink-Style Constellations Could Drive 42% of Space Pollution by 2030 — E&T Magazine

7. Space Debris Removal Technologies & Companies — New Space Tracker

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What If the Most Courageous Thing a Human Can Do Is Walk Toward a Disease That Has No Cure?

There’s a question I keep turning over today: what makes someone put on a hazmat suit and walk into a village where people are dying from a virus science hasn’t fully conquered yet? Not just once — but every single day, for weeks, with no approved treatment in their bag and no guarantee they’ll walk back out healthy. That question has been living with me as I’ve sat with the news coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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There’s an active and serious outbreak right now. Here’s the current picture:

Virus strain: Bundibugyo — notably, there’s no approved vaccine or treatment for this strain (unlike the more common Zaire strain).

Scale (as of ~May 29): ~1,262 suspected/confirmed cases, at least 241 deaths — a roughly 19% case fatality rate.

Countries affected: Primarily the DRC (across Ituri, Nord-Kivu, and Sud-Kivu provinces) and Uganda (9 confirmed cases, 1 death). No cases elsewhere yet.

Containment status: Not contained. The WHO declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on May 17 — the highest alarm level. MSF and other responders are active on the ground, but the multi-province spread in DRC plus cross-border transmission to Uganda indicates it’s still expanding.

The US CDC has issued a health advisory; risk to the general public outside the region is currently assessed as low.

My hope immediately turned to three areas:

1) For the people who are now infected. I hope that somehow all of them will recover, through whatever treatment there is that is being practiced.

2) I hope that the virus can be contained so that others are not infected.

3) I hope that the world comes up with a treatment for this strain of Ebola that might be quickly deployed and accepted by all of those affected — or find a way to prevent those who do not yet have it from getting it.

Hope Is Not the Absence of Fear. It Is What Moves Despite It.

Here’s something that stopped me cold when I found it: during the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak — the largest in history — researchers studying community health workers discovered that the single strongest predictor of whether a responder stayed on the job wasn’t their training, their pay, or even their protective equipment. It was whether they believed their work mattered. Psychologists call this “action-based hope” — the conviction that what you do right now, today, in this moment, shifts the outcome. It’s different from wishful thinking. It’s hope with boots on.

And that’s exactly what I see in the DRC right now, even through the grief of those numbers.

Where I’m Finding It

I’ll be honest — a 19% case fatality rate, no approved vaccine or treatment, a multi-province outbreak crossing an international border into Uganda — this is not easy territory for a hope writer. And I think it would be a disservice to you to pretend otherwise.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: the Bundibugyo strain has been beaten before. The 2007 outbreak in Uganda — also Bundibugyo, also no approved treatment — was contained. The case fatality rate (CFR) then was around 25–34%. Responders went in anyway. Community trust was built. Contact tracing worked. It ended.

That’s not a guarantee. But it is a precedent. And precedents matter enormously when you’re trying to locate hope in the dark.

There are right now, in the Ituri, Nord-Kivu, and Sud-Kivu provinces, people doing the unglamorous, terrifying, sacred work of outbreak response — tracking contacts, building isolation units, sitting with families who are terrified, trying to earn enough trust that someone will tell them who else may have been exposed. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). World Health Organization (WHO). Local health workers who live in those communities and are not going anywhere. These people are not waiting for a perfect vaccine. They’re doing what humans have always done when medicine runs out of answers: they show up anyway.

That is, to me, one of the deepest expressions of hope that exists.

The Science Is Not Silent

Here’s the part that matters for the longer arc: the scientific world is not standing still on Bundibugyo.

The mRNA platform that made COVID vaccines possible in under a year has fundamentally changed what’s possible. Researchers already have genetic sequence data on Bundibugyo. The candidate antivirals being trialed for Zaire strain Ebola — some of which showed extraordinary results — are being evaluated for cross-strain applicability. The global health architecture, imperfect and underfunded as it is, is better than it was in 2014. The WHO’s Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) declaration is not just an alarm — it’s a funding trigger, an international coordination signal, a flare gun that says everyone needs to pay attention now.

Hope, in this case, is a laboratory running 24 hours. It’s a regulatory agency fast-tracking a compassionate use protocol. It’s a supply chain moving personal protective equipment to a province that needs it. Public Health Emergency of International Concern doesn’t always look the way we want it to. Sometimes it looks like logistics.

What I Believe, and You Can Disagree

I’ll take a stance here: I think the global health community has, for too long, treated diseases that primarily affect low-income countries in Africa as someone else’s emergency — right up until they aren’t. We poured historic resources into COVID because wealthy nations were affected. The Bundibugyo strain has been known since 2007. Nearly two decades later, we still have no approved vaccine or treatment for it.

That is not inevitable. It is a choice. And choices can be made differently.

The hope I’m holding today isn’t just for the 1,262 people currently sick. It’s the hope that this outbreak becomes a turning point — the moment the world decides that “low risk to the general public outside the region” is not a sufficient reason to look away. Because those people in the region are the general public. They are someone’s mother. Someone’s child. Someone’s reason to get up in the morning.

Hope, at its best, expands our circle of concern.

It asks us to care about people we will never meet, in places we may never go, facing things we cannot fully imagine. That kind of hope — the kind that moves resources, changes policy, funds research — is not passive. It is the most active thing a human being can do.

Hope isn’t waiting for the cure to arrive. Sometimes hope is the person who goes in before the cure exists.

Today’s Song: “Heal the World” — Michael Jackson

Today’s Question

Most of us will never suit up for an Ebola outbreak. But we have all, at some point, walked toward something frightening because someone we loved needed us to — or because it was simply the right thing to do.

What’s the one moment in your life when you chose to show up despite having no guarantee it would work out — and what made you take that step? Drop it in the comments.

If today’s dose gave you something to hold onto, share it with someone who needs a little light today. And if you’re not yet subscribed, consider joining — a fresh dose of hope lands every day.

SHORT SURVEY

Over the past year, Daily Dose of Hope has grown into something much bigger than I ever imagined, and before I make decisions about where to take it next, I want to better understand you.

What’s helping.
What’s resonating.
What you want more of.
What would make this community even more meaningful.

So I put together a very short survey. It should only take about 2 minutes.

Start Survey

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 64 countries throughout the World.

Most people wait for life to feel lighter before they feel hopeful again.
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A friend asked me the other day if you could find hope in the hantavirus.

I laughed at first — it sounded like a trick question, the kind you ask a hope columnist to see if she’ll fold. Then she sent me a Substack post by an epidemiologist named Katelyn Jetelina, and I sat with it for two days.

Here’s the thing that stopped me in the middle of my coffee:

When her team looked at what people on social media were saying about the outbreak, they saw spiraling. Panic. The familiar drumbeat of this is 2020 again. But when they ran their weekly survey — actually asking real humans, off the algorithm — only 20% of people were concerned. 60% were just curious.

Sixty percent. Curious. Not afraid. Curious.

That single number rewired the whole story for me.

Because what it means is this: the version of America we keep being shown — terrified, tribal, hair-trigger, perpetually one outbreak away from coming undone — is largely a creation of the rooms we’re scrolling through. Outside those rooms, in kitchens and group texts and break rooms and pickup lines, most people are doing something quieter and braver. They’re wondering. They’re asking good questions. They’re applying what they painfully learned in 2020 to a thing they’ve never heard of before, and they’re trying to get it right.

That is not a country that has given up. That is a country quietly enrolled in Epi 201.

I think we forget how hard-won that curiosity is. Six years ago, most of us didn’t know what an R0 was, couldn’t define an incubation period, had never thought about droplet vs. airborne in our lives. Now there are neighborhood moms texting epidemiologists before 7am because they want to understand. That’s not panic. That’s literacy. That’s a population that has decided, against every incentive the internet hands it, to keep learning.

Hope isn’t the absence of the wound. Hope is what the wound makes possible if we tend to it.

The piece I read is honest about how much is still broken — absent leadership, fractured trust, the ache of a trauma we never fully sat with. All of that is true, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But underneath the noise, there is a much larger group of people refusing to be made small by it. Refusing to be reduced to a headline.

One of the passengers quarantined on that boat in Tenerife said it best: “We’re not headlines. We are human beings.”

So here’s where I land, and maybe it’s the unpopular take:

I don’t actually think trust is gone. I think trust got displaced.

It moved out of the big institutions and into the small ones — your group chat, your neighbor, your kid’s pediatrician, the Substack you actually read. The work of the next decade isn’t to drag trust back into the buildings that lost it. It’s to notice where it’s quietly relocated, and to take care of it there.

That’s a job we can actually do. Today. From our kitchen tables.

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

Today’s question for you

When was the last time you caught yourself being curious instead of afraid — and what was the thing that let you stay there a beat longer? Drop it in the comments. Someone reading needs to know they’re not the only one.

And if today’s dose was useful, send it to someone who’d love to feel a little less alone today.

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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 58 countries throughout the World.

Somewhere off the coast of Southern California, the Pacific Ocean is being asked a question humans have spent thousands of years failing to answer at scale: Can you give us back what we’ve always needed from you?

And the ocean, finally, is saying yes.

In about a month, I’ll be heading somewhere thin and high — a destination that sits more than 9,500 feet (about 2,896 meters) above sea level. As I worked through the preparation list, one item kept showing up in bold: drink plenty of fresh water. At altitude, the air is drier, you breathe faster, and your body loses water in ways you don’t even feel. The single most repeated piece of advice from people who’ve made the climb wasn’t about gear or pacing. It was about water.

Of course it was.

I sat with that for a while, and my mind started traveling — the way minds do when you let them — toward just how much of our lives quietly orbit around fresh water.

We are mostly made of it. Roughly 60% of an adult human body is water; the brain is closer to 75%. We can go weeks without food but only about three days without water before the body begins to fail. Every civilization in human history was built on the bank of a river or the lip of a lake. Religion baptizes with it. Poetry returns to it. We greet guests with a glass of it. When someone is grieving or shaken or coming down from a panic, the very first thing we do, almost instinctively, is pour them water. It’s the most ancient form of care we have.

And yet — here’s the part that humbles me — less than 1% of all the water on Earth is fresh water that’s actually accessible to us. The vast majority is locked in ice or buried deep underground or salted into the seas. Right now, around the world, roughly 2 billion people still don’t have safely managed drinking water at home.

Which means that for those of us who can simply turn a handle and watch clean water arrive — cold, clear, free of the parasites and metals and pathogens that have killed more humans than every war combined — we are living inside a small, daily miracle. A miracle we inherited. Built by engineers we’ll never meet, plumbers who came before us, sanitation workers whose names won’t appear in textbooks, and lawmakers who, somewhere along the way, decided that thirst should not be a luxury.

This brings me to the news that started this whole reflection. A desalination facility in Southern California has come online recently and is performing so well that it’s producing fresh water beyond what the immediate region needs. Read that again. Beyond. A surplus pulled from the sea.

For most of human history, “drink the ocean” was a punchline — the thing the desperate sailor does right before he loses his mind. Now it’s becoming infrastructure.

Here’s the part I find quietly astonishing, and the one fact I want you to walk away with today:

Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols spent his career documenting something he called the “Blue Mind” effect — the measurable drop in cortisol, the rise in creativity, and the slowing of the nervous system that happens to humans simply when we’re near water. Our bodies recognize it as home before our brains catch up.

So when we talk about water, we’re not just talking about hydration. We’re talking about an ancient nervous-system memory. A homecoming.

And what’s happening right now in places like Southern California, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and a growing list of coastal communities is that the homecoming is being engineered. We are learning, finally, how to take the most abundant resource on the planet — seawater — and turn it into the most precious one. In the weekend read, I’ll go deeper on the desalination breakthroughs unfolding around the world, including some you’ve probably never heard of. There are more of them than you’d guess, and they are quietly rewriting what’s possible.

Here’s the stance I want to plant today, even though it’s a little bolder than my usual:

Hope, in the 21st century, isn’t a feeling we wait for. It’s a thing we build.

Sometimes it looks like a kind word. Sometimes it looks like a reverse-osmosis membrane filtering the Pacific. Both count.

Hope isn’t poured. It’s purified.

A question for you:

When was the last time water — a glass, a creek, a shower, a wave, a stranger handing you a bottle on a hot afternoon — made you feel, even for a second, like everything was going to be okay? Drop the memory in the comments. I’ll read every one.

Today’s Song: “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — Simon & Garfunkel

Because some songs aren’t songs, they’re rescue ropes. Listen for the line, “When you’re weary, feeling small…” and let it do its old, faithful work.

If today’s dose was useful, share it with someone who could use a little nourishment.

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

Read in 49 states in the US and 54 countries throughout the World

Eight years ago, I died. Not metaphorically. My heart stopped. And when I came back — stubborn, bewildered, grateful — the first real decision I had to make was this: what do I do with a second life?

Yesterday, I looked down at my lunch. One sweet potato. A cup of no-salt-added black beans. A drizzle of balsamic vinegar. That was it. 346 calories. 12.5 grams of fiber. Less than a gram of fat. And something harder to measure — a feeling that my body was quietly, steadily saying thank you.

Here is what I believe, and I’ll say it plainly: a whole foods, plant-based diet is not a punishment. It is a form of devotion. Devotion to the body you were given — or in my case, the body you were given back.

When I eat this way, I feel lighter. Not just physically — though the weight does come off — but mentally. The brain fog lifts. The inflammation that makes joints ache and moods crash has nowhere to hide on a plate of sweet potato and legumes. Research out of the Nutritional Neuroscience journal has found that diets high in fiber and low in saturated fat are associated with measurably lower levels of inflammatory markers — the same markers closely linked to depression and cognitive decline.

The science, briefly

Studies show that the gut microbiome — home to roughly 100 trillion bacteria — produces about 90% of the body’s serotonin. A high-fiber, plant-based diet feeds the beneficial strains that support that production. In other words: what you eat is, quite literally, shaping how hopeful you feel.

When I loosen the noose — when I let salt creep back in, when I reach for sugar — I feel it within 48 hours. Puffy. Foggy. Heavier in ways that have nothing to do with the scale. The body doesn’t lie. It keeps a more honest ledger than we do. (I have more than fallen off this wagon—time to tighten the noose again—knowing I can do so gives me hope).

I won’t pretend this is always easy. Following a whole foods plant-based diet requires intention in a world engineered for convenience and comfort eating. But here is the stance I’ll take, even if it’s unpopular: most of us are not overeating because we lack willpower. We’re overeating because the food we’re surrounded by is specifically designed to make us feel better — briefly — and then worse. What I’m describing isn’t discipline. It’s just choosing a slower, steadier kind of good.

And that hope — the kind you can taste, the kind your body recognizes — is renewable. You can access it again tomorrow at lunch.

Today’s Song: “Feeling Good”—Nina Simone

Question for you:

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 below.

If today’s dose was useful, share it with someone who could use a little nourishment. And if you’d like a daily dose delivered to you — subscribe below.

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

Read in 47 states in the US and 53 countries throughout the World.

I recently announced a brand new addition to my Substack publication: A Daily Dose of Hope subscriber chat.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

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How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

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3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

The Most Hopeful Thing We’re Doing Right Now Isn’t on Earth

What if hope isn’t just a feeling—but something we build, launch, and send 240,000 miles into space?

That’s part of what makes the Artemis II mission so powerful. On the surface, it’s a technical milestone—humans returning to deep space for the first time since Apollo 17. But underneath that, it represents something deeper: a shared human decision to keep going.

Here’s a surprising truth: psychologists who study long-term motivation have found that progress toward meaningful goals—even distant ones—can significantly increase collective optimism and resilience. In other words, when we pursue something bigger than ourselves, especially something that stretches across years and generations, it changes how we see what’s possible.

And that’s exactly what this mission does.

Because the NASA isn’t just sending four astronauts around the Moon. They’re demonstrating that after decades of setbacks, budget cuts, shifting priorities, and global uncertainty, we can still organize ourselves around something ambitious, peaceful, and profoundly human.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough:

This mission isn’t about getting back to where we’ve been. It’s about proving we can still choose a future.

A future where thousands of scientists, engineers, and dreamers collaborate across borders.
A future where exploration isn’t driven by competition alone, but by curiosity.
A future where we invest in something that won’t pay off tomorrow—but matters anyway.

Hope, it turns out, is not passive. It’s built.

And maybe the most hopeful part of all?

The Artemis program is designed to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon. That’s not just progress in space—it’s progress in who gets to be part of humanity’s story.

Hope is the courage to invest in a future you won’t reach alone.

So yes, a spacecraft circling the Moon might seem distant from our everyday lives.

But it quietly answers a question many people are carrying right now:

Are we still capable of doing big, meaningful things together?

This mission says: yes.

And that answer travels a long way.

Today’s Song: “Satellite”—-Dave Matthews Band

A question for you:

What’s one long-term goal—yours or humanity’s—that, even if it feels far away, gives you a sense that the future is still worth building?

Drop it in the comments.

Someone out there may need your story more than you know.

If today’s dose resonated, share it.

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

Read in 47 states in the US and 53 countries throughout the World.

Day 287: Why Hope Sometimes Shows Up as Anxiety

Again, a hearty welcome to all the new members of the DDH’s Hopeful Community. I’m so glad you’re here.

Let me begin with a question: What if anxiety is not the opposite of hope, but one of the places hope begins?

That may sound backwards. We tend to think of hope as calm, uplifting, and bright, while anxiety feels jagged, restless, and dark. But today I lived through an experience that reminded me those two emotions often travel together.

As many of you know now, I’m bald and proud of it. But being bald also means my scalp has had years of direct sunlight. Even though I wear hats and put sunscreen on, my dermatologists have told me for some time that I should treat the actinic keratosis, or AK, on my scalp. AK is a common rough, scaly patch caused by long-term UV exposure. Dermatologists treat it seriously because some AKs can progress to squamous cell carcinoma, and there is no reliable way to know which ones will and which ones won’t.

Over the years, the main options I was offered were specialized creams that needed to be applied for weeks. They were not appealing. You have to complete the course, avoid sun exposure, and endure the kind of skin reaction that can make it look as though you’ve gone through an inferno.

Then, at a recent visit, my dermatologist suggested something different: a “one and done” treatment called photodynamic therapy. Mayo Clinic describes photodynamic therapy for AK as applying a light-sensitive solution to the skin and then exposing it to a special light; common side effects can include burning during treatment and then temporary redness, swelling, and scaling afterward.

So I signed up.

And that is when both hope and anxiety arrived.

Hope, because I was taking a step that could reduce risk down the road.

Anxiety, because this procedure had been portrayed in vivid terms: intense pain on the scalp, a fierce sunburn feeling afterward, and discomfort that might leave you questioning why you had agreed to it in the first place.

Because the treatment was scheduled far in advance, I had plenty of time to think about it. Probably too much time. As today approached, both emotions intensified. I spoke with just about everyone I encountered about what was coming. I googled. I searched the web. I read. I imagined. I hoped. I worried.

And then something interesting happened.

My hope and my anxiety led me into learning.

As my wife and I sat in the room with both my dermatologist and his world-class registered nurse, I peppered them with every question imaginable. And I mean every question. That was after I had already spent hours reading about the topic. I’m not an expert, but by the time we were done, I understood so much more about precancerous skin changes, cancerous skin changes, and the photodynamic therapy process itself.

There is actually something deeply human about that. Research suggests that uncertainty can increase curiosity, even while it decreases happiness. In other words, not knowing can be uncomfortable, but it can also drive us to seek information, understanding, and clarity. That felt exactly right to me today.

And then the learning turned into something even better: compassion.

What struck me most was not just the skill of these practitioners, but their warmth. Each of them expressed, in their own way, that they truly hoped I would be okay. They knew I would be okay. Their calm did not dismiss my anxiety. It met it. Their explanations did not overwhelm me. They steadied me. Their manner said something powerful without needing dramatic words: We see you. We understand why you’re anxious. And we’re here with you.

That changed everything.

The warm embrace calmed my anxiety. The education I received filled my mind. And the actual procedure itself left me with great hope. It was not at all as challenging as I had feared. A tad tingly in my scalp, yes. But entirely manageable. And now I’m on the mend.

That experience made me think more broadly about life.

Maybe hope and anxiety are not enemies after all.

Maybe, in some of our most important moments, they are partners.

Hope says, This matters enough to step toward it.

Anxiety says, This matters enough to pay attention.

And when those two are held well, something beautiful can happen. Anxiety can push us to ask better questions. Hope can keep us from being swallowed by fear. Learning can replace vagueness with understanding. And compassion—from others, and eventually from ourselves—can make a hard thing feel bearable.

Here is the stance I would take today: hope and optimism are not the same thing. Optimism says, “This will probably be easy.” Hope says, “Even if it’s hard, I can meet it.” That distinction matters. False optimism can make people feel naive. Real hope gives people courage.

And courage often grows in the very places where anxiety first appeared.

So perhaps one of the hidden gifts of anxiety is that, when it is met with good people, good questions, and good care, it can become a doorway. A doorway to knowledge. A doorway to humility. A doorway to compassion.

Today reminded me that some of the most hopeful moments in life do not come when fear is absent.

They come when fear is present, but love, learning, and kindness show up too.

Hope and anxiety are not always rivals; sometimes anxiety is simply hope asking to be accompanied.

That is where I found hope today.

A specific question for you:
When was the last time you walked into something anxious and walked out of it wiser or more cared for than you expected? What did someone say or do that made you feel safe?

Today’s song: “Stand by Me” — Ben E. King

As always, please share this with someone who could use a dose of hope today. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe.

If you have hopeful thoughts that you would like me to share with our Hopeful Community, anonymously, please share them with me at: bernard@bernarddavid.com

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

Day 281: What If Laughter Is One of Hope’s Most Defiant Acts?

A laughing group?

At first, that can sound almost unbelievable.

When life is hard, when the body is exhausted, when fear is no longer abstract but deeply personal, laughter can feel like the last thing in reach. And yet one of my friends—who has lived with lung cancer for a long time, who has pursued excellent medical care, and who has also searched for non-traditional ways to support her whole being—found her way to laughing groups.

And to her surprise, they gave her great hope.

Laughing groups, often called laughter clubs or laughter yoga groups, bring people together to laugh intentionally. Not because something is necessarily funny. Not because anyone is denying reality. But because laughter itself—combined with breath, movement, eye contact, and community—can change the emotional weather inside a person, even if only for a while.

I find that deeply hopeful.

Because hope is not always grand. Sometimes it is not a cure, not an answer, not a breakthrough. Sometimes hope is simply a shift. A loosening. A reminder that pain does not get to occupy every inch of the room.

That is what seems so powerful to me about laughing groups.

They do not ask people to pretend.
They do not require a false smile.
They do not erase fear, grief, uncertainty, or illness.

What they can do is interrupt despair’s monopoly.

They can return a sense of agency to someone whose life may feel overrun by appointments, scans, side effects, waiting, and worry. They can reconnect a person to breath, to other human beings, and to the part of the self that still knows how to feel lightness. Even a brief moment of that can matter enormously.

In fact, that may be one of the great overlooked truths of being human: we do not live by solutions alone. We also live by moments that help us keep going.

A person can be seriously ill and still laugh.
A person can be frightened and still feel joy.
A person can be carrying very hard news and still respond to warmth, rhythm, play, and connection.

That does not make their struggle less real.
It makes their humanity more visible.

And maybe that is why this moves me so much.

Too often, we think of hope as something dramatic—some huge turnaround, some triumphant ending, some reason to believe that everything will soon be fine. But many of the most important forms of hope are quieter than that. They are the kinds that help a person live inside uncertainty without being fully consumed by it.

A laughing group, in that sense, is not trivial at all.

It is a small act of resistance.
A refusal to surrender the spirit.
A way of saying: illness may shape this chapter, but it does not get the final word on my inner life.

Sometimes hope does not arrive as an answer. Sometimes it arrives as a breath, a circle, and a laugh you borrow until your own returns.

So yes, laughing groups give me hope.

They give me hope because they remind me that healing is not always the same as curing. Sometimes healing is being brought back, however briefly, to connection, aliveness, and the possibility of joy. For someone walking through illness—or loving someone who is—that is not small.

It is sacred.

Question for members of our Hopeful Community:

What is one unexpected practice—not a medicine or a procedure, but something else entirely—that helped you or someone you love feel more alive during a difficult season?

Today’s song: “I Love to Laugh” Edwynn

And if today’s dose spoke to you, share it with someone who may need a little hope today.

March 17, 2026. Day 280

What if the very technology that unsettles us… is also quietly teaching us how to hope better?

Today, when people talk about artificial intelligence, the conversation often swings between awe and anxiety.

Will it replace us?

Will it mislead us?

Will it outpace our ability to control it?

All fair questions.

But there is another question—one we ask less often:

Where, exactly, is the hope in all of this?

A surprising truth about intelligence (human or artificial)

Researchers studying problem-solving have found something fascinating:

Progress accelerates when feedback loops shorten.

In simple terms, the faster you can try something, learn, adjust, and try again—the faster you improve.

Artificial intelligence—especially large language models (LLMs) and emerging “world models”—does exactly that. At scale.

That’s not just a technological breakthrough.

It’s a hope engine.

Where hope lives in LLMs

Large language models—systems that can read, write, reason, and converse—offer something profoundly human:

They lower the barrier to expression and understanding.

• A student anywhere in the world can ask questions without fear of judgment

• An entrepreneur can prototype ideas instantly

• A caregiver can find words when they don’t have any left

In essence:

LLMs give people a second brain when their first one is tired, overwhelmed, or stuck.

The challenge

They can hallucinate.

They can mislead.

They can reflect biases in the data they were trained on.

The hope

We are already learning how to improve them—through better training data, real-time verification, human-in-the-loop systems, and transparency.

And here’s the deeper point:

Every flaw we uncover is not just a risk—it’s a roadmap for improvement.

That’s hope in action:

Not perfection, but iteration.

Where hope lives in world models

World models—AI systems that simulate environments, predict outcomes, and “understand” how things work—are even more quietly revolutionary.

They allow us to ask:

• What happens if we change this climate variable?

• What happens if we redesign this city?

• What happens if we intervene earlier in disease?

They let us practice the future before we live it.

The challenge

They can oversimplify reality.

They can encode incorrect assumptions.

They can create false confidence if we trust them blindly.

The hope

We don’t have to choose between blind trust and rejection.

We can pair simulation with humility.

We can improve models with better data, interdisciplinary input, and constant testing against the real world.

And perhaps most importantly:

We can use them not to predict one future—but to explore many better ones.

A stance worth considering

Here’s something that may sound counterintuitive:

Hope and intelligence are not separate forces—intelligence, properly guided, is one of hope’s most powerful tools.

But only if we stay engaged.

Because AI will not decide whether it becomes a force for hope.

We will.

The deeper layer

There’s something almost poetic here.

We have built machines that learn by:

• Trying

• Failing

• Adjusting

• Trying again

Sound familiar?

It’s the same process by which humans grow, heal, and hope.

In teaching machines to iterate, we are being reminded how to live.

“Hope is not that AI will be perfect—it’s that, like us, it can keep getting better.”

A closing thought

Perhaps the real promise of artificial intelligence is not that it replaces human potential…

…but that it reveals how expandable human potential has always been.

A question for you

When you think about artificial intelligence—LLMs, simulations, all of it—

what is one specific way it could make your life, or someone else’s life, meaningfully better in the next year?

Drop it below.

Today’s Song: “Fix You”—Coldplay

And if today’s dose gave you even a small sense of possibility, share it with someone who could use a little more hope in their future.

Daily Dose of Hope

March 10, 2026

Hope, Discovered Around the World

What if hope had a geography?

Not just a feeling—but a map.

A map where every continent has a pin in it.

A map where scientists wake up each morning and quietly try to solve problems that once seemed impossible.

Today I took a small trip around the world—not on an airplane, but through science stories. And what I found reminded me of something important:

Hope is being built in laboratories, observatories, hospitals, and forests all over the planet.

Europe: Sending Light Across Deep Space

In Europe, one of the most beautiful breakthroughs is not just about discovery. It is about connection.

In July 2025, the European Space Agency established Europe’s first deep-space optical communication link—using light to connect with NASA’s Psyche mission at a distance of about 265 million kilometers. That is not just a technical achievement. It is a reminder that human beings keep finding new ways to reach across impossible distances.

There is something deeply hopeful about that.

We live in a time when many people feel disconnected from one another, from institutions, even from the future. And yet here were scientists proving that light itself can carry meaning across deep space.

Hope is sometimes this simple: we are still learning how to reach farther than we thought we could.

Asia: Medicines Built From Code

Across Asia, artificial intelligence is transforming medicine.

Researchers are now using AI to design entirely new drugs—molecules that no human had ever imagined.

In some cases, AI-designed medicines are moving from computer model to human clinical trials in a fraction of the traditional time.

Traditional drug discovery can take 10 to 15 years, while AI-assisted discovery has the potential to compress early-stage work dramatically. That does not eliminate the need for careful testing, of course, but it does change the speed of possibility.

Sometimes hope arrives quietly—written not in ink, but in code.

North America: Editing Disease at Its Source

Here in North America, one of the most hopeful scientific shifts is happening inside the human genome.

The FDA has already approved Casgevy, the first FDA-approved therapy to use CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, for certain patients age 12 and older with sickle cell disease. For people who have lived with repeated pain crises and uncertainty, that is not just a new treatment. It is a new chapter.

Think about what this means.

For years, medicine often focused on managing symptoms. Now, in some cases, science is beginning to correct the underlying genetic instructions themselves.

That does not mean every disease will suddenly disappear. But it does mean this: some of the suffering that once felt permanent is beginning to look changeable.

Hope is not pretending pain is small. Hope is seeing that even pain may not get the last word.

South America: Protecting the Planet’s Greatest Forest

In South America, new satellite technologies and AI monitoring systems are helping protect the Amazon rainforest in ways that were once impossible.

Illegal logging and forest loss can now be detected far faster than before, giving governments, researchers, and Indigenous communities more power to respond before damage spreads too far. ESA’s recent Earth-observation work has emphasized how new radar-based mapping is helping scientists monitor forests in unprecedented detail.

Hope is not only invention.

Sometimes it is protection.

Sometimes it is watching over something precious before it disappears.

A Thought Worth Holding Onto

Here’s something we do not talk about enough:

At any given moment, thousands upon thousands of scientists around the world are working on problems they may never personally solve.

They do it anyway.

Because someone will.

That might be one of the most hopeful things about being human.

Hope isn’t just something we feel. It’s something people are quietly building all over the world.

A Question for You

Which scientific breakthrough makes you most hopeful right now—and why that one?

Not just the smartest one.

The one that touches something human in you.

Drop it in the comments below.

And if today’s dose felt useful, share it with someone who could use a reminder that good work is happening all over the world.

Today’s Song: “World” — Five for Fighting

It has the right mix of wonder, humility, and global perspective for a post like this—quietly reminding us that every person, every place, and every breakthrough is part of something larger.