Compliments of Bella Russomanno (Thank you!)

The Glimmer of Hope Foundation

In Providence, Rhode Island in the United States on August 3rd a hotel ballroom was sold out. There were 510 people there to raise funds for kids fighting cancer. They successfully brought in $153,809! During the evening, about 50 children and teens walked a runway together; they were people who were either mid-treatment or years out from their cancer. The event’s sponsor of this “Glimmer Gala” was an organization called the Glimmer of Hope Foundation. A girl named Ella Catherine Integlia got leukemia so her friend, Ali Hornung, wouldn’t just sit with the sadness of it. Hornung sewed dolls with no hair, like the kids in the ward and wrote a children’s book called Hope Has No Hair. The non-profit that has grown out of this effort is thriving with “Best Day Ever” experiences for these kids and their parents.

Note that the Foundation wasn’t named, “Certainty of Hope Foundation” but “Glimmer of Hope Foundation.”

Origin of the word, Glimmer

I began to wonder where the word “glimmer” actually came from. Turns out it traces back to a Proto-Germanic root tied to Old English glæm, meaning brightness, filtered through Middle Dutch and Middle Low German — glimmen, glimmern. When the verb first showed up in English in the late 1300s, it meant to shine brightly. Yet, by the early 1400s the meaning shifted to shine dimly, flicker, or barely hold on. In the 1580s, the noun appeared. And, somewhere over two centuries, the word got much smaller. It went from bright to barely there.

This transformation tells you something about hope as well. When was the last time you heard someone was reaching for “a blaze of hope” or “a flood of hope” especially when things are genuinely hard? We reach for glimmer, because a blaze feels fake, especially when dealing with a crisis. A flicker feels honest and is small enough to believe.

The Research

As I’ve discussed in other posts, psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades studying what hope does inside a person. It is really two things working together: agency, the will to keep going, and pathways, the ability to see more than one route to get there. People who are strong in both cope more effectively with trauma, stay more resilient under prolonged stress, and are less flattened by loneliness or family strain. In this context, hope isn’t really a mood. It’s closer to a skill: naming a goal, building a backup plan when the first one fails, and having enough will left to try the backup.

Studies on adults living with advanced cancer keep finding that hope levels track with quality of life and psychological wellbeing. It is not because hope changes the diagnosis but it changes what a person can carry with them. This is not meant to create the allusion that everything will be fine. It means still finding something worth doing today, in the middle of not knowing how it will end.

Back to the Glimmer Gala in Providence, Rhode Island. Nobody there thinks a doll without hair will cure leukemia. The glimmer isn’t in the outcome. It’s in showing up, in the room refusing to let cancer be the only thing anyone talked about that night.

Glimmer doesn’t promise anything and I think that’s the point of the word. It’s not a guarantee. It’s just enough light to take the next step without walking into a wall. Some nights that’s all you get. Some nights it’s genuinely all you need.

A glimmer doesn’t need to become a blaze of hope to matter.

Question

What’s the smallest sign of hope you’ve noticed lately — the kind you almost didn’t count because it seemed too small to mean anything?

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

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

A Glimmer of Hope Foundation raises $153,809 for kids with cancer — Patch

Etymology of "glimmer" — Etymonline

Hope Theory — Positive Psychology

Hope and illness expectations in advanced cancer — PMC

Hope, medical expenditure and survival in advanced cancer — PubMed

New Hope Mills on the site of the future Bucks County Playhouse

Recently, after 435 Daily Doses of Hope, I found my myself having writer’s block. It seemed as if a change in environment might help to unblock it. I thought of places to go and, while driving to one location, my car, almost by instinct, directed me to a town near where my wife and I had lived many years ago. I didn’t even register why I was going to this town. Yet, before I knew it, I found myself in the middle of a place called New Hope, Pennsylvania.

I felt myself becoming less blocked and wrote what is now yesterday’s Daily Dose of Hope. Yet, it took hours to realize something that was staring me in the face. The town I was in was named New Hope.

The name piqued my curiosity, which caused me to do research on the the place. Here is what I learned.

Along the Delaware River in what we now know as Bucks County, Pennsylvania in the United States, the Lenni-Lenape tribe of indigenous people (aka the “First Settlers” if they were in Canada) lived for thousands of years. Then, about 320 years ago, the town we know as New Hope began as a ferry crossing named Coryell’s Ferry. When a fire destroyed Benjamin Parry’s mill in 1790, he could have just shut down his operation. Instead, he rebuilt it and named the new mill, New Hope Mills. Remarkably, the towns people adopted the “new hope” portion for their entire town.

Why the above matters? It gives the word hope a definition that is more useful than optimism. Hope faced up to what was lost and envisions what could exist next. And then that hope allowed people to follow through to rebuild. It acknowledged the reality and dealt with it through positive action.

Over the years, New Hope has had to keep practicing that approach and definition.

The town used to move freight via the Delaware River and a canal in town. When the transportation systems changed, the community repurposed them. For the longest while, the canal hosted a horse drawn barge which I remember riding as a youth. It and the paths along the Delaware River now are places for walking and gathering.

In the 1930s, an aging gristmill was slated to be demolished. Artist and theater patrons (including playwright Moss Hart) came to the rescue. They reopened what is now known as the Bucks County Playhouse and have featured such talent as Robert Redford and Grace Kelly.

William Lathrop, Daniel Garber, Edward Redfield and others helped establish the New Hope School of Pennsylvania Impressionism. They used New Hope to become a creative refuge for artists who wanted to create something new. Today, we can still see their imprint as well as those of woodworkers like George and Mira Nakashima and Mark Sfirri.

Most recently, New Hope became a community of new hope for people who wanted to live more openly as themselves. In 2002, it became the first borough in Pennsylvania to adopt a comprehensive ordinance banning discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

New Hope is a hopeful pattern that has been repeated across more than two centuries.

A mill burns. Rebuild it.

An industry fades. Reinvent.

A building becomes obsolete. Turn it into a theater.

People need belonging. Make room.

Hope is not a prediction that things will be fine; it is a decision to help make a future worth arriving in.

New Hope offers all of us an interesting perspective: honor the past by carrying forward those things that are alive within it and allow it to take a new form.

The lesson? You don’t need a whole plan to rebuild everything. Maybe you need to discover and name something small that you are willing to create from what has changed. That leaves you with true hope.

Question

What is one “burned-down mill” in your own life that you are beginning to see as the possible site of a new beginning? Drop it in the comments.

Today’s Song: I Can See Clearly Now” — Johnny Nash

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

visitnewhope

bcptheater

newhopeborough

A new member of our hopeful community shared the following with me last week that gave them a profound sense of hope.

“During the severe heatwave over the past few days, the Danube River dropped to dangerously low water levels, bringing our primary nuclear power plant to the brink of a complete shutdown. Facing a potential utility crisis, an inspiring wave of nationwide unity took place.

For nearly a week, both major companies and everyday citizens voluntarily reduced their electricity and water consumption. Because of this collective effort, we successfully stabilized the grid, avoiding widespread blackouts and severe municipal water restrictions.

Hope Can Be Found In Unity

Seeing an entire country proactively step up to protect the community during a climate strain was a powerful reminder of what humans can achieve when we pull together.”

It impressed me that an entire country could rally the way it did, so, given my natural curiosity, I dug deeper to learn more details:

• A severe heat wave and drought drove the Danube River to historically low levels, threatening the cooling water supply for nuclear power plants in both Hungary (Paks) and Romania (Cernavodă). AP News

• In Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant—which normally supplies roughly 40–50% of the country’s electricity—had already reduced output and came within millimeters of a complete shutdown. Prime Minister Péter Magyar publicly urged citizens and businesses to reduce electricity consumption, especially during evening peak hours. Reuters

• Many large companies agreed to cut energy use, and the government dimmed decorative lighting and implemented other conservation measures. Authorities credited these efforts with helping stabilize the power system until cooler weather and slightly higher river levels arrived. Reuters

• Hungary avoided a worse power crisis as conservation, emergency measures, and a slight rise in the Danube bought time. Reuters

Wow, just wow.

Question

When was a time that your community came together in a sign of unity to address an impending crisis? Drop it in the chat.

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

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 95 countries throughout the World.

There’s a stretch in almost every long effort where hope stops feeling like a fire and starts feeling like a whisper you have to keep repeating to yourself. Not the loud failures — the quiet, uncertain middle. If you’ve ever wondered why that part is the hardest, you’re in good company.

I’ve been working on something for a while now. At times it seemed to be working. At others, not so much. Yet throughout this continuum of work, I’ve always had hope that things would work out. It’d be untrue, though, to say I was always feeling hopeful — there were stretches when the effort didn’t seem to be going anywhere at all. But I kept telling myself: don’t give up hope. Recently, that effort has started to bear real fruit, and it’s even accelerating.

Psychologists have studied exactly this pattern. Researcher C.R. Snyder followed college freshmen and found something surprising: it wasn’t raw IQ or entering test scores that best predicted who’d graduate and how they’d perform — it was hope, specifically the capacity to reroute toward a goal when the first path closed.

Hope, measured properly, beat aptitude at predicting outcomes.

What moved things for me wasn’t optimism sitting quietly in the background — it was hope paired with tenacity, with the flat refusal to treat quitting as an option. Hope without that second ingredient is just a nice feeling. Hope with it is a strategy.

Hope isn’t the belief that it will work out. It’s the refusal to decide, in the middle, that it won’t.

Today’s song: “Rise Up” — Andra Day

Question

What’s the thing you almost quit on — the one where, looking back, the breakthrough was closer than you thought? Drop it 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 92 countries throughout the World.

Okay, weird question to start with: what if the most radical thing happening in the country right now isn’t loud or viral at all? It’s just a letter. One that shows up in your mailbox and says, simply, you don’t owe this anymore.

One of the members of our hopeful community shared something that popped up in her Facebook feed, and honestly, I loved it too much not to pass along.

A 23-year-old guy from Louisiana just got functionally cured of sickle cell disease. Gene therapy did what generations of medicine couldn’t. Some of the diseases we assume we’re just stuck with? Maybe we’re not.

A hospital in London opened the UK’s first rooftop garden built specifically for intensive care patients. Even people on life support get wheeled up there now, hours in the sun, actual fresh air. Somebody over there figured out that healing the person matters as much as treating the illness.

There’s a daycare in Finland that ripped out the pavement and replaced it with forest floor, dirt, real gardens. The kids got healthier almost immediately. They’re expanding the program nationwide now. Turns out nature was doing this job long before we showed up with our clipboards.

Something like a quarter million people in California are about to watch their medical debt disappear, just like that. Gone. If you’ve ever opened a bill you were dreading, you know exactly what that letter is worth.

And in New York, of all things, a children’s book ended up shaping real childcare policy for families. Which is kind of perfect, right? The stories that got us through as kids somehow turn into the systems that carry us as adults.

Here’s a statistic that stuck with me. Researchers at Boston University and Harvard followed tens of thousands of people over years and found the most optimistic ones lived something like 11 to 15% longer than the least optimistic — even after adjusting for income, health habits, chronic illness, all of it. There’s apparently a whole body of psychology research on this, on the specific moment someone decides things are going to be okay. Hope isn’t just a vibe. It’s showing up in the data.

Hope isn’t a mood, it’s a habit that clocks in whether you feel like it or not.

And look, unpopular opinion maybe, but the boring stories are usually the ones that actually matter. Nobody’s optioning a movie about a rooftop garden or a state debt-relief program. But a year from now, someone’s whole life looks different because of exactly this kind of unglamorous, unsexy work. The stuff that never trends is usually the stuff that sticks.

Question

What’s one piece of good news you heard this year that made you want to immediately text five different people? Tell me in the comments.

Today’s Song “Good Days” — SZA

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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 88 countries throughout the World.

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.

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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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.
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.

Here’s something that nagged at me for years: the most genuinely hopeful people I know went through a period of serious cynicism first.

Not the performative kind. The real kind — where you’ve been disappointed enough times that you stop believing in much of anything.

So I started asking: what if cynicism and hope aren’t opposites? What if one is secretly made of the other?

Psychologist Julie Norem coined a term worth knowing: defensive pessimism. In her research, people who expected the worst — and thought through exactly how things could go wrong — actually performed better under pressure and reported higher feelings of agency and control. The cynic’s habit of bracing for disappointment isn’t just self-protection. It creates a kind of emotional runway.

But here’s the part that really stays with me.

You can only be cynical about things you care about.

No one walks around cynical about the weather in a city they’ll never visit. Cynicism requires investment. It requires that at some point, you wanted something — badly enough that when it didn’t show up, it left a mark.

Which means: somewhere inside every cynic is a person who still believes things could be better. Otherwise, why would the disappointment sting at all?

Cynicism is hope that got hurt. The cure isn’t blind optimism. It’s a safer place to try again.

I’m not saying cynicism is a virtue. The chronic kind — the kind that calcifies — can keep you from seeing what’s actually possible. But that early-stage cynicism? That wary squinting at the world? That’s not the opposite of hope. That’s hope protecting itself while it heals.

The people who changed things — in history, in communities, in families — weren’t naive optimists who assumed everything was fine. They were people who saw exactly what was broken, held the weight of it, and chose to act anyway.

That’s not optimism. That’s something more durable.

Here’s where I’ll say the quiet part out loud: I’m more suspicious of people who’ve never been cynical than of people who have. A hope that’s never been tested isn’t hope. It’s just comfort.

Today’s question

Think of a time your cynicism turned out to be the beginning of something better — not the end of it. What shifted? Drop it in the comments.

🎵 Today’s Song: “Last Hope” — Paramore

(Hayley Williams at her most raw. A song about holding on when holding on feels absurd. Perfect.)

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

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.

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 1, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

Why a simple chair might be one of the most hopeful objects in your house

What if I told you I could find hope in anything—even the first object my eyes land on?

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That sounds like a claim you’d want to test. (You should.)

This weekend, I spent a lot of time thinking about Daily Dose of Hope: organizing the content since last June, building the scaffolding for a much bigger year ahead, and preparing for a massive scaling campaign. My goal is simple and stubborn: spread apolitical, hopeful content to people throughout the world.

And one year from now, my BHAG—my Big Hairy Audacious Goal—is this:
1,000,000 readers.

I’ve also hired some amazing people to help me think about hope—what it is, where it hides, and how we can practice it. Stay tuned. We genuinely think you’re going to enjoy what’s coming.

But the biggest shift this weekend wasn’t logistical. It was personal.

A member of our Hopeful Community asked me yesterday: “How do you come up with a hopeful missive every day?”

The honest answer: I’ve built a pipeline. I keep a running list of topics, themes, and half-formed sparks that could become tomorrow’s entry.

And then—almost daily—the pipeline gets pre-empted.

Because something happens. Something small, or startling, or quietly beautiful. A line I read. A conversation. A memory. A moment of gratitude. A hard truth. A tiny, bright contradiction to despair.

Writing Daily Dose of Hope has trained me to notice.

Not just to look for hope when it’s obvious…
…but to practice finding it when it isn’t.

Here’s the surprising part (and I love this): psychologists have a name for a close cousin of this skill—“cognitive reappraisal.” It’s the ability to change what an experience means to you by changing how you interpret it. And it’s one of the most reliable tools we have for regulating emotion and building resilience over time.

Which leads me to today.

I promised myself that I would write something hopeful about the first object that caught my eye in the room where I’m writing this.

It was a chair.

A chair is not glamorous. It doesn’t announce itself. It simply waits.

But the more I sat with it (pun absolutely intended), the more it started to glow with meaning:

• A chair is a place that holds you without asking you to earn it.

• A chair is a signal of belonging. If there’s a chair for you, someone imagined your arrival.

• A chair is a small act of faith in the future. We don’t put chairs in rooms for the past—we put them there for what might happen next: conversation, rest, dinner, work, reunion.

• A chair says: pause is allowed here. Recovery is part of progress.

• And sometimes the most hopeful thing isn’t movement. Sometimes it’s support.

Here’s my stance for today (gently, but clearly):

Hope and optimism aren’t the same thing.
Optimism says, “It’ll probably work out.”
Hope says, “Even if it’s hard, I can find a way forward—and I won’t do it alone.”

A chair, in its quiet way, is hope’s furniture.

Hope is often just the world offering you a place to sit—so you can stand up again.

Now let’s test my claim.

Drop one topic in the comments—anything at all: an object, a fear, a frustration, a headline, a habit, a place, a relationship, a season of life. And I’ll respond right there with a short hopeful thread on your topic.

Today’s Song: "Blackbird" — The Beatles

Today’s specific question

What’s one ordinary object you use every day (mug, keys, shoes, desk, sink, phone…) that you’ve never thought of as hopeful—until now? Tell me what it is, and where you are in the world when you’re reading this.

If Daily Dose of Hope is nourishing you, share it with one person who could use a steadier chair this week. And if you’d like these daily, you can subscribe below.

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.

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 25, 2026. Hope you enjoy it.

Yesterday, as many of you know, my day was filled with both hope and anxiety.

I underwent photodynamic therapy on my bald head to treat actinic keratosis. Today is day two. And while I’m grateful not to be in much pain, I’m feeling something else that may be even harder: I just want it to be over.

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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That feeling got me thinking.

What if one of the hardest parts of being human is that healing rarely looks hopeful while it is happening?

We want healing to be quick. Clean. Reassuring. We want to go from problem to solution in a straight line. But real healing almost never works that way. It is often red before it is restored. Tender before it is strong. Uncomfortable before it is complete.

And yet, maybe that is exactly where hope begins.

Not at the end.
Not after everything is polished and resolved.
But in the middle, when something inside us is still repairing.

That is where I am today.

Photodynamic therapy is designed to destroy damaged cells so healthier skin can emerge. Which means the visible reaction—the redness, the irritation, the waiting—is not the failure of healing. It is the evidence of healing.

That feels bigger than medicine.

How many things in life work this way? Grief. Recovery. Trust. Relationships. Even courage itself. They often look messiest right before they begin to become something new.

So today I want to take a slight stance:

Hope and optimism are not the same thing.

Optimism says, “This will get better fast.”
Hope says, “Even if this takes time, I believe something good is happening.”

That distinction matters.

Because optimism can vanish when things look bad. But hope can survive the redness, the waiting, the uncertainty, and the unfinished parts. Hope does not require the picture to be pretty. It only requires the belief that the story is not over.

And maybe that is why healing can give us so much hope.

It proves that change is possible.
It reminds us that damaged things can mend.
It shows us that the body—and often the heart—knows how to answer injury with repair.

Healing is hope made visible.

That is the line I am holding onto today.

Not because today feels easy.
Not because I enjoy waiting.
But because I am being reminded, in real time, that the messy middle is sometimes where the most important work is happening.

So if you are healing from something right now—physically, emotionally, spiritually, or silently—perhaps the invitation is not to rush through it, but to notice this:

You may already be becoming whole again, even if it does not yet look that way.

And that, to me, is hope.

What is one time in your life when something looked worse in the middle, but later turned out to be the start of real healing? Drop it in the comments. Your story may be exactly what someone else needs to read today.

Today’s song: Hold On — Wilson Phillips

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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 looked at my calendar this morning and stopped. Juneteenth. A federal holiday celebrated in the United States every June 19th. I knew the name. I knew it mattered. But I realized I couldn’t give you a clean, honest answer about where it came from or why it belongs in any serious conversation about hope. So I went looking. What I found is one of the most quietly astonishing stories in American history—and one of the most instructive.

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The law changed. Enslaved people in Confederate states were, from that moment, legally free.

The Civil War ended in April 1865.

It wasn’t until June 19, 1865—two and a half years after that proclamation—that Union soldiers rode into Galveston, Texas, and delivered the news to the last large group of enslaved Americans still being held in bondage.

Freedom had been real. It had been law. And it had been deliberately withheld.

Here’s what stops me cold every time I sit with this: those people were already free. They had been free for 900 days. And yet they woke up every morning under the weight of chains that the law had already broken.

The Surprising Fact Worth Holding Onto

Psychologists who study what’s called “information asymmetry”—the deliberate withholding of knowledge as a tool of control—find it consistently more durable than physical force. You can fight physical restraint. It’s much harder to fight what you don’t know you’re missing. The enslavers in Texas understood this intuitively. Keep the news from arriving and freedom stays theoretical.

Which means the act of announcing freedom—of getting the news to Galveston on June 19—wasn’t just administrative. It was liberation in the truest sense. The law had spoken in 1863. Reality caught up on June 19, 1865.

What Happened Next Is the Part That Wrecks Me

One year later, in 1866, freed Black Americans in Texas organized the first Juneteenth celebration. They cooked. They prayed. They gathered. They named the date—not with bitterness, but with joy. They took the very day their freedom had been delayed and turned it into a feast.

That is not naive hope. That is something rarer and more durable: defiant hope. The kind that doesn’t wait for circumstances to improve before deciding to celebrate being alive.

For 155 years—passed down family to family, church to church, neighborhood to neighborhood—communities kept Juneteenth alive without a single law requiring them to. The federal government didn’t officially recognize it as a national holiday until 2021. But the people who held this flame never needed permission from Washington to hope.

The Stance I’ll Take

We often talk about Juneteenth as a celebration of freedom’s arrival. And it is. But I think the more honest, more uncomfortable story is that it’s a reckoning with delay—with the gap between what is declared and what is delivered, between what is legal and what is real.

That gap isn’t only American history. It shows up in our own lives with uncomfortable regularity. The apology that came a decade too late. The diagnosis that finally had a name after years of being dismissed. The love you were allowed to have only after years of being told it wasn’t right.

Juneteenth asks us to sit with a hard question: What freedom has already been granted to you—in law, in reality, in the hearts of people who love you—that you haven’t yet let yourself receive?

Freedom can be real before you feel it. Hope can exist before you know you’re allowed to have it.

That’s not a consolation. That’s a map.

Today’s Question

What’s one thing in your life—a door, a permission, a version of yourself—that you later realized had been available to you far longer than you thought, but something kept you from walking through it? Drop it in the comments.

🎵 Today’s Song “A Change Is Gonna Come” — Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke wrote this after being turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana in 1963—the same year Lincoln’s proclamation turned 100. It is one of the most honest songs ever written about hope: not the easy kind, but the kind that costs something. “It’s been a long time coming / but I know a change is gonna come.” That line isn’t optimism. It’s faith—and faith is heavier and more honest than optimism. Play it today. Sit with it.

And if today’s dose landed, share it with someone who needs a reminder that the news sometimes arrives late—but it still arrives.

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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.

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.

Subscribe now

What if the most anxious generation in history is actually the most hopeful?

I know. That sounds backwards. Sit with it for a second.

I’ve been thinking about Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation — a book I keep returning to, not because it’s comfortable reading, but because it feels important. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s what you need to know.

Haidt’s central argument is this: something broke around 2012. That’s when smartphones became ubiquitous, social media moved into every pocket, and childhood — which for millennia had been physical, unstructured, and imperfect — went suddenly, almost entirely, digital.

He calls it the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” And the data is hard to look away from: rates of major depressive episodes among teenage girls increased by more than 60% between 2010 and 2019. Among boys, 40%. Loneliness spiked. Sleep cratered. Anxiety became the defining condition of a generation.

Haidt’s case isn’t just diagnostic — it’s architectural. He argues that the shift from play-based childhood (where kids learn to negotiate, fail, repair, and grow through friction with real human beings) to phone-based childhood (where social life is curated, permanent, and performed for an audience) disrupted something fundamental in how adolescent brains develop. His prescriptions are specific: no smartphones before high school, phone-free schools, more unsupervised outdoor play, later social media access. Not nostalgia. A structural fix for a structural problem.

It’s a serious, well-argued book. Read it.

But here’s what Haidt doesn’t quite say — and what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

This generation hasn’t checked out. They’re worried about the future. And I think that distinction matters more than we’ve given it credit for.

Here’s the finding that stopped me: Gen Z is more likely than any previous generation to seek therapy, name their emotions with precision, and advocate loudly for systemic change. The most anxious generation in recorded history is also, by several measures, the most emotionally literate. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what happens when people still care about what comes next.

The neuroscience here is quietly extraordinary.

Anxiety and hope run on the same circuitry.

Both involve what researchers call “prospection” — the brain’s ability to simulate future states, to reach forward in time and run the tape. You cannot feel anxious about something you’ve given up on. You cannot hope for an outcome you’ve stopped believing is possible.

Which means every anxious teenager scrolling at 2am, every young person exhausted by the state of the world, every kid who can’t sleep because the future feels uncertain — is carrying, inside that discomfort, a belief that the future is still worth worrying about.

Anxiety is just hope that hasn’t found its footing yet.

I’m not arguing we shouldn’t fix what’s broken. We should, urgently. Haidt is right about the phones. He’s right about the play. He’s right that we restructured childhood without asking whether the new design was good for children.

But I think the generation that grew up inside that rewiring deserves more than our concern. They deserve our respect. Because they didn’t go numb. They went alert. Hypervigilant, often to their own detriment — but alert. Alive to injustice. Unwilling to perform okayness when they’re not okay.

That restlessness? That’s a signal. It means they still believe better is possible.

That’s hope. Uncomfortable, unformed, sleepless hope — but hope.

🎵 Today’s Song: “Vienna” — Billy Joel

“Slow down, you crazy child / You’re so ambitious for a juvenile.” Written in 1977 about a young man grinding himself to exhaustion. Never more relevant than right now.

Today’s question

What’s one thing you were anxious about that eventually became something you’re proud you fought for? Drop it below.

If today’s dose helped, pass it along to someone who could use a little grounding. And if you’re not subscribed yet — join us below.

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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 have friends who seem to be constantly overwhelmed. I feel for them. Genuinely.

The exhaustion in their voices. The way the list never empties. The sense that they’re treading water in a sea that keeps rising.

But something started nagging at me. A quiet contrarian thought I couldn’t shake:

What if feeling overwhelmed is actually the beginning of hope?

Most people treat overwhelm like a warning sign — back off, slow down, get it together.

But what if it’s an invitation?

Here’s what’s strange: the research suggests that the collapse of control — that moment when the to-do list defeats you, when the weight of everything lands at once — can actually be a doorway into something more honest than the optimism you had before.

Psychologists call it post-traumatic growth: the measurable phenomenon where people who’ve passed through their worst seasons report not just recovery, but a kind of clarity and meaning they didn’t have on the other side. Not despite the overwhelm. Because of it.

The mechanism is almost counterintuitive. Overwhelm strips the illusion that you can manage everything. And when that illusion goes, something quieter takes its place — a question: what do I actually care about here? That narrowing is clarifying. You stop defending a hundred small positions and start locating what matters.

The people who find hope inside overwhelm aren’t the ones who white-knuckle through it. They’re the ones who find one small point of agency — not control of everything, just something they can do, choose, or release. That foothold is enough. Treading water, it turns out, is a form of hope.

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.

Read more

For decades, psychologists studied trauma the way mechanics study a wrecked car. They catalogued the damage. They mapped the cracks. They asked, with great care, how to put the pieces back together.

Read more

There’s a strange thing that happens when you sit down on a rowing machine for the first time in a while: your body starts to remember something your mind has been trying to forget.

That you can do hard things. That tomorrow is not finished. That fifteen minutes of effort can be a kind of letter you write to your future self — an invoice that says, I haven’t given up on you yet.

I climbed on my rower this week and pulled for fifteen minutes. That’s it. Not a marathon. Not a transformation. Just fifteen minutes of moving a piece of equipment that doesn’t actually go anywhere. And by the time I stepped off, something had shifted in me that no amount of journaling or affirmation had been able to touch.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s not just endorphins.

Read more

There’s a strange thing that happens when you sit down on a rowing machine for the first time in a while: your body starts to remember something your mind has been trying to forget.

That you can do hard things. That tomorrow is not finished. That fifteen minutes of effort can be a kind of letter you write to your future self — an invoice that says, I haven’t given up on you yet.

I climbed on my rower this week and pulled for fifteen minutes. That’s it. Not a marathon. Not a transformation. Just fifteen minutes of moving a piece of equipment that doesn’t actually go anywhere. And by the time I stepped off, something had shifted in me that no amount of journaling or affirmation had been able to touch.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s not just endorphins.

Read more

There are two people in my family who, lately, both have been quietly teaching me something I didn’t sign up to learn.

I won’t say more about them — that’s their story to tell, not mine. But the lesson they’re handing me, just by being who they are right now, has rearranged how I think about hope.

When someone you care about is in the middle of a hard chapter, you start to notice things. The way a phone call ending in “I’m okay” can mean fifteen different things depending on the pause before it. The way you measure progress in millimeters most people would miss. The way you start carrying their good day like it’s your own.

Psychologists actually have a name for the territory I’m describing. Charles Snyder spent decades developing what he called hope theory, and his finding was the kind that sticks: hope isn’t a feeling. It’s a cognitive skill — the ability to picture a way forward, plus the will to walk it. People who score higher on hope measures don’t just feel better. They recover faster, report less pain, and their immune systems behave differently.

Hope is something the body listens to.

But here’s what nobody told me until I had to learn it myself: hope is contagious in both directions. The person doing the healing needs it, obviously. But the people loving them through it need it just as much — and somehow, the two of you end up borrowing it from each other on the days neither of you has any.

I used to think hope was the soft cousin of optimism. I’ve changed my mind. Optimism says it will all work out. Hope says I don’t know if it will, and I’m going to keep showing up anyway. That’s not soft. That’s what love looks like when it has to do the work.

Hope isn’t only about the person healing. It’s also about the people in the waiting room, on the other end of the phone, holding a place at the table.

Today’s Song: "Don't Give Up" — Peter Gabriel & Kate Bush

So here’s what I want to ask you today: when someone you love has been through a hard season, what’s a tiny, ordinary moment — a word, a gesture, a meal, a phone call — that you didn’t realize was hope until later? Drop it in the comments.

And if today’s dose was useful, share it with someone who’s standing at the start of a new trail.

Liked today’s dose of hope? Subscribe to the Daily Dose of Hope and get the next missive — short reflections during the week, longer reads on the weekend — delivered straight to your inbox. Hope, freshly poured, every morning.

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 55 countries throughout the World.

We’ve gotten very good at asking how are you — and very bad at answering it honestly.

What would happen if today, just once, someone told the truth?

The research

Researchers studying emotional suppression found that people who regularly mask their feelings — particularly in professional or social contexts — show elevated cortisol levels, impaired immune function, and significantly higher rates of burnout compared to those who find outlets for authentic expression.

More striking: the people around emotional suppressors also experience elevated stress. Performed okayness, it turns out, is contagious. And so, according to the same research, is authentic vulnerability.

When someone tells the truth about how they’re doing, it gives others permission to do the same. The clinical term is emotional contagion. The everyday term is: someone finally said it.

Not every hard thing needs to be reframed as a lesson right away. Sometimes the most honest thing is to acknowledge that something is hard before you’ve figured out what it’s teaching you.

The rush to meaning is real, and sometimes it’s a form of avoidance. This newsletter is called the Daily Dose of Hope — but I think real hope begins with telling the truth about where we actually are.

You don’t have to have learned the lesson yet. You’re allowed to still be in the middle of it.

If you’re in a hard chapter right now — not a hard day, a hard chapter — this one’s for you.

You don’t have to perform your way through it. You’re allowed to still be figuring out what this is.

And you’re not alone in that. Fifty-three countries worth of people read this newsletter. Some of them are in the middle of something too.

Today’s Song: “The Night Will Always Win” — Elbow

What’s something you’ve been quietly carrying that you haven’t said out loud yet? You don’t have to share the whole thing. Even one word counts. The comments are a safe place.

If today’s dose found you at the right moment, share it with someone who could use it. And if you’re not subscribed yet — join our Hopeful Community. A little hope, every day.

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 55 countries throughout the World

What if hope isn’t a feeling that arrives when things get better — but a skill that some people practice, quietly, while everything is still hard?

That would change everything about where to look for it.

Psychologists Charles Snyder and Shane Lopez spent decades studying hope not as an emotion but as a cognitive process — something closer to a muscle than a mood. Their Hope Theory identifies two distinct components: the belief that a goal is achievable, and the ability to generate pathways toward it when the first one gets blocked.

In other words, hopeful people aren’t the ones who see no obstacles. They’re the ones who see around them.

What’s striking: hope levels, measured clinically, are among the strongest predictors of academic performance, physical health recovery, and resilience under stress — stronger, in many studies, than IQ or natural talent.

We tend to think of hope as passive

Something that either comes to us or doesn’t. But I think the research is pointing at something more active and more demanding: hope requires imagination. It requires the willingness to picture a version of your life that doesn’t exist yet and treat it as worth moving toward.

That’s not soft. That’s one of the harder things a human being can do.

Hope isn’t optimism. Optimism says things will work out. Hope says: I will find a way.

One question

What’s a path you haven’t tried yet?

Not a solution. Not a plan. Just a direction you haven’t walked in yet because you assumed it was closed.

Hope, it turns out, is mostly about being willing to try the door.

Today’s Song: “Keep Your Head Up” — Ben Howard

What’s one door you’ve been assuming was locked — that you haven’t actually tried? I’m genuinely asking. The comments are open.

If today’s dose found you at the right moment, share it with someone who could use it. And if you’re not subscribed yet — join our Hopeful Community. A little hope, every day.

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