hope essay

Essays About Hope: Top 5 Examples Plus 5 Prompts

No matter what happens in life, we all have hopes and dreams. If you are writing essays about hope, you can start by reading our top examples and prompts.

Hope is said to be “the remedy for grief and despair.” It allows us to long for better days whenever we are feeling down. When we are hopeful, it is as if we are trying to wish or manifest for something to happen; we sincerely anticipate whatever we are hoping for.

Hope is an important feeling since it keeps us optimistic, but like all things, it is not good in excess. We often get lost in our hope and let it delude us into thinking the most unrealistic things. It is good to hope, but you should not allow it to get the best of you.

5 Top Essay Examples

1. a reflection of hope by shannon cohen, 2. my hopes & dreams by celia robinson, 3. hope: the forgotten virtue of our time. by paul j. wadell, 4. an ideal of hope by jonathan belle.

• 5. ​​Hope and Reality by Greg Arnold

1. What Is Hope?

2. what do you hope for your future, 3. what makes me hopeful, 4. feeling hopeless in life, 5. how to help others be more hopeful.

“Hope is a fighter. Hope may flicker or falter but doesn’t quit. Hope reminds us that we are Teflon tough, able to withstand the dings, scratches, and burns of life. Hope is the quintessential “hype-man.” Hope will have you raise the roof, jump up and down, and rock side to side believing that you are magic, your dreams are within reach, and your life is greater than your present circumstances. We All Need Hope.”

Intertwined with quotes about hope, Cohen’s essay describes the many roles that hope can play in our lives. With hope, we can learn from our mistakes and improve ourselves. It fuels us to achieve our goals, helps us keep persevering, and inspires us. We are also the products of our ancestors’ hopes and dreams. 

“As I have mentioned earlier, everyone wants to become successful in the future. I do also; I want to go University, yet I haven’t decided what for so far. I want to grow up and make my Parents proud, especially when my Dad’s up there watching over me. I want to be happy. But every step I take, has the potential of changing my entire path, where my life is leading. So I must live life to the full, no matter what. Hope is something everyone needs.”

Robinson reflects on what she is hopeful for, recalling her childhood fantasies of living an idyllic, magical life. She discusses her dreams of going to university and making her parents, specifically her deceased father, proud of her. She hopes to live life to the fullest and for a better world. In particular, she hopes to see the day when cancer is no longer as severe an issue as it is today. Hope is important and is something everyone should have. 

“Hope keeps us from being so immersed in the good things of this world that we forget who we really are, a people on the move, pilgrims who are called not to stay put but to move toward the feast. Most of all, hope prevents us from becoming so comfortable with the pleasures of life that the possibility of a journey never even occurs to us.”

Wadell writes about hope from a Christian point of view; however, his message speaks to everyone. He gives readers a brief history of hope as a virtue in Christianity, saying that hope should be directed towards God and his kingdom. Hope allows us to appreciate all that is good in the world while keeping us longing for more. To nurture our feelings of hope, Wadell says that we must practice gratitude and spread hope to others. 

“Hope is important because hope involves the will to get there, and different paths for you to take. Life can be difficult and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Yet, hope allows you to keep going down different roads, to see things different, and to try and make things for your perfect ideal. This hold true, even when there seems like there isn’t a solution.”

In this essay, Bell writes about his interpretation of hope: it is universal and gives us the will to work for whatever we hope for, not just sitting around and waiting for it to happen. For our hopes to be fulfilled, we must also put in the work. Bell also writes that you can strengthen your sense of hope by surrounding yourself with positive people and planning your goals. We are also called to bring hope to others so we can be hopeful for a better future. 

5. ​​ Hope and Reality by Greg Arnold

“Don’t be pessimistic and you have to remember that most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all- Dale Carnegie. Finally, it is acceptable to spend some time in hope but don’t live in it, you need to live in reality which is the way in getting things into results.”

Arnold’s essay explains the importance of keeping our hopes grounded in reality, not too optimistic yet not negative as well. We cannot predict the future, but we can at least yearn for the better and strive to work for it to happen. He believes that we should stop being so pessimistic about the world and dream big, for the hopes of many can be accomplished with hard work and determination. 

5 Prompts for Essays About Hope

The definition of hope can differ from person to person, as our experiences shape our sense of hope. In your essay, you can write about what hope means to you. Then, briefly explain why you are hopeful and what you hope for if you wish. You can also check out these essays about jealousy .

We all have our hopes and dreams for our futures. Reflect on hope and share what you hope for in your future and why you hope for it. Perhaps you hope for a long and healthy life or something as simple as hoping for a good grade on your test. The scope can be as small as a few days or ten years, as long as you can share your thoughts clearly and descriptively. 

For your essay, you can write about what makes you hopeful. Describe a person, memory, idea, or whatever else you may choose, and explain why it makes you hopeful. Many things invoke hope, so make sure your essay reflects your personal opinion and includes anecdotes and memories. For example, you may have a relative that you are inspired by, and their success could make you hopeful for your own future.

The world is not perfect, and we all feel despondent and hopeless from time to time. Look back on time you could not bring yourself to hope for better. Discuss what led you to this situation and how you felt. This may be a sensitive topic to write about, so do not go too in-depth if you are not comfortable doing so.

If someone you know is feeling hopeless, chances are you would try to lift their spirits. Address your essay to people who feel hopeless and give tips on improving one’s mental health: they can be as simple as getting more sleep or being outdoors more. For an in-depth piece, cite psychological studies to support your tips.

Grammarly is one of our top grammar checkers. Find out why in this Grammarly review .

For help picking your next essay topic, check out our top essay topics about love .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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• Yale Divinity School

Reflections

You are here, theologies of hope.

This article is a shortened adaptation of a two-part “For the Life of the World” podcast on the theme of hope that YDS Professor Miroslav Volf posted in summer 2020, produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. You can listen here to podcast Part 1 and Part 2 .

Fear, more than hope, is characteristic of our time. In the late 1960s, we were optimistic about the century’s hopes for the triumph of justice and something like universal peace, but that has given way to increasing pessimism. “No future” scenarios have become plausible to us. As I write in summer 2020, the coronavirus pandemic gives the dominant shape to our anxieties. But even before the pandemic, we feared more than we hoped. We feared and continue to fear falling behind as the gap widens between the ultra-rich and the rest who are condemned to run frantically just to stay in the same place yet often cannot prevent falling behind. We fear the collapse of the ecosystem straining under the burden of our ambitions, the revenge of nature for violence we perpetrate against it. We fear loss of cultural identities as the globe shrinks, and people, driven by war, ecological devastation, and deprivation, migrate to where they can survive and thrive.

Politically, the consequence is the rise of identity politics and nationalism, both driven largely by fear. Culturally, the consequences are dystopian movies and literature, and the popularity of pessimistic philosophies. In religious thought and imagination, too, apocalyptic moods are again in vogue. Hope seems impossible; fear feels overwhelming.

A Thing With Feathers

The Apostle Paul has penned some of the most famous lines about hope ever written: “For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24-25). Hope is a strange thing – as Emily Dickinson declares in her famous poem , it’s a “thing with feathers” perched in our soul, ready to take us on its wings to some future good. In fact, hope is a thing that has already taken us to that good with the tune that it sings. In hope – or perhaps by hope – “we were saved,” writes Apostle Paul. In hope, a future good which isn’t yet, somehow already is. A future good we cannot see, which waits in darkness, still qualifies our entire existence. We might be suffering or experiencing “hardship … distress … persecution … famine … nakedness … peril … sword … we are being killed all day long” (Romans 8:18, 35-36), and yet we have been saved and we are saved.

Interpreting the phrase “in hope we are saved,” Martin Luther suggested in his Lectures on Romans that just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so “hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for.” [1]   Thus, a key feature of hope is that it stretches a person into the unknown, the hidden, the darkness of unknown possibility. For Paul this can happen because God is with us – God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence things that do not exist.

Hope vs. Optimism vs. Expectation

When I hope, I expect something in the future. I cannot hope for my 18-year-old son to know how to ride a bike, because he knows that already. But I can hope for him to do well in college, for that’s where he is headed in the fall. Without expectation for the future, there can be no hope. But we don’t hope for everything we can expect in the future. We generally don’t hope for natural occurrences, such as a new day that dawns after a dark and restful night; I know , more or less, that the next day will come. But I may hope for cool breezes to freshen up a hot summer day. We reserve the term “hope” for the expectation of things that we cannot fully control or predict with a high degree of certainty. The way we generally use the word, “hope” can be roughly defined as the expectation of good things that don’t come to us as a matter of course . That’s the distinction between hope and expectation.

The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes the dead alive, justifies hope that is otherwise unjustifiable.

In his justly famous book Theology of Hope (1964), Jürgen Moltmann, one of the greatest theologians of the second part of the 20th century, made another important distinction, that between hope and optimism. [2] The source of the distinction relates to the specific way some ancient biblical writers understand hope. Optimism, if it is justified, is based on extrapolations we make about the future based upon what we can reasonably discern to be tendencies in the present. Meteorologists observe weather patterns around the globe and release their forecasts for the next day: the day will be unseasonably warm, but in the early afternoon winds will pick up and bring some relief; now you have reason to be optimistic that the afternoon will be pleasant, perhaps you even look forward to sailing your little 12-foot sloop on three-foot swells. Or, to take another scenario, you and your spouse are healthy adults of childbearing age, you have had no trouble conceiving, and the obstetrician tells you that your pregnancy is going well; you have reason to be optimistic that you will give birth to a healthy child. The present contains the seeds of the future, and if it is well with these seeds, the future that will grow will be good as well. That’s reasonable optimism.

Hope, argued Moltmann, is different. Hope is not based on accurate extrapolation about the future from the character of the present; the hoped-for future is not born out of the present. The future good that is the object of hope is a new thing, novum , that comes in part from outside the situation. Correspondingly, hope is, in Emily Dickinson’s felicitous phrase, like a bird that flies in from outside and “perches in the soul.” Optimism in dire situations reveals an inability to understand what is going on or an unwillingness to accept it and is therefore an indication of foolishness or weakness. In contrast, hope during dire situations, hope notwithstanding the circumstances, is a sign of courage and strength.

What is the use of hope not based on evidence or reason, you may wonder? Think of the alternative. What happens when we identify hope with reasonable expectation? Facing the shocking collapse of what we had expected with good reasons, we will slump into hopelessness at the time when we need hope the most! Hope helps us identify signs of hope as signs of hope rather than just anomalies in an otherwise irreparable situation, as indicators of a new dawn rather than the last flickers of a dying light. Hope also helps us to press on with determination and courage. When every course of action by which we could reach the desired future seems destined to failure, when we cannot reasonably draw a line that would connect the terror of the present with future joy, hope remains indomitable and indestructible. When we hope, we always hope against reasonable expectations. That’s why Emily Dickinson’s bird of hope “never stops” singing – in the sore storm, in the chilliest land, on the strangest sea.

Hope Needs Endurance, Endurance Needs Hope

We are most in need of hope under an affliction and menace we cannot control, yet it is in those situations that it is most difficult for us to hold onto hope and not give ourselves over to darkness as our final state. That is where patience and endurance come in. In the same letter to the Romans, in the same passage that celebrates hope and its transformative darkness, Paul writes: “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). “Patience” is here the translation of hypomone , which is better rendered as endurance, or perhaps “patient endurance.” 

Neither patience nor endurance are popular emotions or skills. Our lives are caught in a whirlwind of accelerated changes; we have little endurance for endurance, no patience with patience. Technological advances promise to give us lives of ease; having to endure anything strikes us as a defeat. And yet, when a crisis hits, we need endurance as much as we need hope. Or, more precisely, we need genuine hope, which, to the extent that it is genuine, is marked by endurance.

When the great Apostle says in Romans 8:25 that if we hope, we wait with endurance, he implies that hope generates endurance: because we hope we can endure present suffering. That was his point in the opening statement of the section on suffering in Romans 8:18: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.” The hope of future glory makes present suffering bearable. But, in Romans 5:3-5, he inverts the relation between hope and endurance. There he writes, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” Now endurance helps generate hope. Putting the two texts together, Romans 8 and Romans 5, we can say: hope needs endurance and endurance needs hope; genuine endurance is marked by hope; and genuine hope is marked by endurance.

The God of Promises

More than half a century after his Theology of Hope , Jürgen Moltmann has written an essay, On Patience (2018), about two aspects of patience we find in the biblical traditions: forbearance and endurance. Writing as a 92-year-old, he begins the second paragraph of this essay on patience autobiographically:

In my youth, I learned to know “the God of hope” and loved the beginnings of a new life with new ideas. But in my old age I am learning to know “the God of patience” and stay in my place in life . [3]

Youth and old age, Moltmann goes on to say, are not about chronology, but about experiences in life and stances toward life. Hope and patience belong both to youth and to old age; they complement each other. He continues:

Without endurance, hope turns superficial and evaporates when it meets first resistances. In hope we start something new, but only endurance helps us persevere. Only tenacious endurance makes hope sustainable. We learn endurance only with the help of hope. On the other hand, when hope gets lost, endurance turns into passivity. Hope turns endurance into active passivity. In hope we affirm the pain that comes with endurance, and learn to tolerate it. [4]

Hope and endurance – neither can be truly itself without the other. And for the Apostle Paul, both our hope and our ability to endure – our enduring hope – are rooted in the character of God. Toward the end of Romans, he highlights both “the God of endurance” (or steadfastness) and “the God of hope” (Romans 15:5, 13). Those who believe in that God – the God who is the hope of Israel, the God who is the hope of Gentiles and the hope of the whole earth – are able to be steadfast and endure fear-inducing situations they cannot change and in which no good future seems to be in sight. But more than just endure. Paul, the persecuted apostle who experienced himself as “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,” was hoping for more than just endurance from the God of hope. Toward the very end of his letter to the Christians in Rome – in the second of what looks like four endings of the letter – he writes: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). In the midst of affliction, the God of hope opens us up for the possibility of joy and comprehensive well-being.

Our salvation lies in hope, but not in hope that insists on the future good it has imagined, but in hope ready to rejoice in the kind of good that actually comes our way. The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes dead alive – the God of the original beginning of all things and the God of new beginnings – justifies hope that is otherwise unjustifiable. When that God makes a promise, we can hope.

Miroslav Volf is Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at YDS and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good (Brazos, 2011) and other books.

[1] Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans , edited by Hilton C. Oswald, volume 25 of Luther’s Works , edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann (Concordia Publishing House, 1972), p. 364.

[2] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology , translated by Margaret Kohl (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).

[3] Jürgen Moltmann, Über Geduld, Barmherzigkeit und Solidarität (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2018), p. 13, my translation.

[4] Moltmann, pp. 13-14.

Essay on Hope

Students are often asked to write an essay on Hope in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Hope

Introduction.

Hope is a powerful feeling that pushes us to strive for better. It’s the spark that lights up dark times, a beacon guiding us through life’s storms.

The Essence of Hope

Hope is believing in the possibility of a brighter future. It’s the trust that things will improve, no matter how bleak they seem.

Hope in Everyday Life

We see hope in small things: a seed sprouting, a sick friend recovering, or a new day dawning. These give us strength.

Hope is essential. It’s the force that keeps us moving forward, even when the road is tough.

Also check:

• Paragraph on Hope

250 Words Essay on Hope

Introduction to hope.

Hope, a seemingly simple four-letter word, carries profound implications for our lives. It is a psychological construct that serves as a beacon, illuminating the path amidst the darkest moments, and a driving force that propels us forward in the face of adversity.

Hope: A Psychological Perspective

From a psychological standpoint, hope is not merely a passive state of desire; it’s an active state of mind, a dynamic process involving goal setting, planning, and motivation. It is a cognitive function that allows us to envision a better future, fostering resilience and facilitating recovery from setbacks.

The Power of Hope

The power of hope extends beyond the individual. It can influence interpersonal relationships, community dynamics, and societal changes. When hope is shared, it can spark collective action, leading to transformational changes in communities and societies. It can bridge gaps, heal divisions, and inspire movements.

Hope and Well-being

Hope has a profound impact on our well-being. Numerous studies have shown a direct correlation between levels of hope and mental health. High levels of hope can mitigate the effects of stress and anxiety, promote optimism, and enhance life satisfaction.

Conclusion: The Necessity of Hope

Hope, therefore, is not just a luxury, but a necessity. It is the fuel that keeps the engine of life running, the thread that weaves the fabric of our existence. As we navigate through life’s complexities, hope remains our guiding light, a testament to our innate capacity for resilience and growth.

500 Words Essay on Hope

Hope is a powerful and transformative human emotion, a beacon of light that pierces the darkness of despair and uncertainty. It is often described as the expectation of a positive outcome or the belief in a better future, irrespective of the current circumstances. It is this feeling of anticipation and trust that fuels our resilience and propels us forward, even in the face of adversity.

The Psychology of Hope

From a psychological perspective, hope is not merely a passive waiting but an active engagement with the future. It involves setting goals, having the tenacity to pursue them, and believing in one’s ability to achieve them. This is echoed in the words of psychologist Charles R. Snyder, who proposed the Hope Theory, arguing that hope consists of ‘agency’ (the motivation to achieve goals) and ‘pathways’ (the ability to generate ways to reach those goals).

Hope as a Catalyst for Change

Hope is not just an emotion; it is a catalyst for change. It is the spark that ignites action and the fuel that keeps it going. When we hope, we are not only envisioning a better future but also setting the wheels in motion to bring it about. Hope inspires creativity, innovation, and perseverance, turning dreams into reality.

Hope in the Face of Adversity

In the face of adversity, hope serves as a protective shield, buffering us against despair and disillusionment. It provides us with the strength to endure, to keep going when the odds are against us. It is hope that gives us the courage to confront our fears, to face our challenges, and to overcome our obstacles.

The Power of Collective Hope

Hope is not just an individual experience; it is also a collective phenomenon. Collective hope, or the shared anticipation of a better future, can be a powerful force for social change. It can motivate communities to come together, to work towards common goals, and to effect meaningful change. The civil rights movement, the fight against climate change, and the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic are all testament to the power of collective hope.

In conclusion, hope is a powerful and transformative emotion that fuels resilience, inspires action, and drives change. It is the belief in a better future, the strength to endure adversity, and the collective anticipation of positive change. As philosopher Ernst Bloch once said, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” It is hope that propels us forward, that keeps us striving, that makes us human.

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‘Hope is a​n embrace of the unknown​’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times

We may be living through times of unprecedented change, but in uncertainty lies the power to influence the future. Now is not the time to despair, but to act

Y our opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.

In 2003 and early 2004, I wrote a book to make the case for hope. Hope in the Dark was, in many ways, of its moment – it was written against the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq. That moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defence.

Coming back to the text more than a dozen tumultuous years later, I believe its premises hold up. Progressive, populist and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we have undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing.

This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It is also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both. The 21st century has seen the rise of hideous economic inequality, perhaps due to amnesia both of the working people who countenance declines in wages, working conditions and social services, and the elites who forgot that they conceded to some of these things in the hope of avoiding revolution. The attack on civil liberties, including the right to privacy, continues long after its “global war on terror” justifications have faded away.

Worse than these is the arrival of climate change, faster, harder and more devastating than scientists anticipated. Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes and shifts in consciousness that address these things now. This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change and deep shifts in ideas, perspective and frameworks for large parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things).

I t is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naivety,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors , one of the founders of Black Lives Matter , early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”. It is a statement that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist.

The tremendous human rights achievements – not only in gaining rights but in redefining race, gender, sexuality, embodiment, spirituality and the idea of the good life – of the past half-century have flowered during a time of unprecedented ecological destruction and the rise of innovative new means of exploitation. And the rise of new forms of resistance, including resistance enabled by an elegant understanding of that ecology and new ways for people to communicate and organise, and new and exhilarating alliances across distance and difference.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

There are major movements that failed to achieve their goals; there are also comparatively small gestures that mushroomed into successful revolutions. The self-immolation of impoverished, police-harassed produce-seller Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010, in Tunisia was the spark that lit a revolution in his country and then across northern Africa and other parts of the Arab world in 2011. And though the civil war in Syria and the counter-revolutions after Egypt’s extraordinary uprising might be what most remember, Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution” toppled a dictator and led to peaceful elections in that country in 2014.

Whatever else the Arab spring was, it is an extraordinary example of how unpredictable change is and how potent popular power can be. And five years on, it is too soon to draw conclusions about what it all meant. You can tell the genesis story of the Arab spring other ways. The quiet organising going on in the shadows beforehand matters. So does the comic book about Martin Luther King and civil disobedience that was translated into Arabic and widely distributed in Egypt shortly before the uprising. You can tell of King’s civil disobedience tactics being inspired by Gandhi’s tactics, and Gandhi’s inspired by Tolstoy and the radical acts of noncooperation and sabotage of British female suffragists.

So the threads of ideas weave around the world and through the decades and centuries. There is another lineage for the Arab spring in hip-hop, the African-American music that’s become a global medium for dissent and outrage; Tunisian hip-hop artist El Général was, along with Bouazizi, an instigator of the uprising, and other musicians played roles in articulating the outrage and inspiring the crowds.

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organising and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.

Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of centre stage. Our hope and often our power.

C hanging the story isn’t enough in itself, but it has often been foundational to real changes. Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.

A victory doesn’t mean that everything is now going to be nice forever and we can therefore all go and lounge around until the end of time. Some activists are afraid that if we acknowledge victory, people will give up the struggle. I have long been more afraid that people will give up and go home or never get started in the first place if they think no victory is possible or fail to recognise the victories already achieved. Marriage equality is not the end of homophobia, but it’s something to celebrate. A victory is a milestone on the road, evidence that sometimes we win and encouragement to keep going, not to stop. Or it should be.

My own inquiry into the grounds for hope has received two great reinforcements in recent years. One came from the recognition of how powerful are the altruistic, idealistic forces already at work in the world. Most of us would say, if asked, that we live in a capitalist society, but vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives – our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organisations – are in essence noncapitalist or even anticapitalist, made up of things we do for free, out of love and on principle.

In a way, capitalism is an ongoing disaster that anticapitalism alleviates, like a mother cleaning up after her child’s messes. (Or, to extend the analogy, sometimes disciplining that child to clean up after itself, through legislation or protest, or preventing some of the messes in the first place.) And it might be worth adding that noncapitalist ways of doing things are much older than free-market economic arrangements. Activists often speak as though the solutions we need have not yet been launched or invented, as though we are starting from scratch, when often the real goal is to amplify the power and reach of existing options. What we dream of is already present in the world.

The second reinforcement came out of my investigation of how human beings respond to major urban disasters, from the devastating earthquakes in San Francisco (in 1906) and Mexico City (in 1985) to the blitz in London and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The assumption behind much disaster response by the authorities – and the logic of bombing civilians – is that civilisation is a brittle facade, and behind it lies our true nature as monstrous, selfish, chaotic and violent, or as timid, fragile, and helpless. In fact, in most disasters the majority of people are calm, resourceful, altruistic and creative. And civilian bombing campaigns generally fail to break the will of the people

What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shone out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their work together with other survivors. This century of testimony suggested how much we want lives of meaningful engagement, of membership in civil society, and how much societal effort goes into keeping us away from these fullest, most powerful selves. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organising, as if by instinct when the situation demands it. Thus a disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.

“M emory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann noted. It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope.

Amnesia leads to despair in many ways. The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view. In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change. Those who think that way don’t remember raids on gay bars when being homosexual was illegal, or rivers that caught fire when unregulated pollution peaked in the 1960s or that there were, worldwide, 70% more seabirds a few decades ago. Thus, they don’t recognise the forces of change at work.

One of the essential aspects of depression is the sense that you will always be mired in this misery, that nothing can or will change. There’s a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don’t always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.

The other affliction amnesia brings is a lack of examples of positive change, of popular power, evidence that we can do it and have done it. George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Controlling the past begins by knowing it; the stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do. Despair is also often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as of certainty.

News cycles tend to suggest that change happens in small, sudden bursts or not at all. The struggle to get women the vote took nearly three-quarters of a century. For a time people liked to announce that feminism had failed, as though the project of overturning millennia of social arrangements should achieve its final victories in a few decades, or as though it had stopped. Feminism is just starting, and its manifestations matter in rural Himalayan villages, not just major cities.

Other changes result in victories and are then forgotten. For decades, radicals were preoccupied with Timor-Leste, brutally occupied by Indonesia from 1975 to 2002; the liberated country is no longer news. It won its liberty because of valiant struggle from within, but also because of dedicated groups on the outside who pressured and shamed the governments supporting the Indonesian regime. We could learn a lot from the remarkable display of power and solidarity and Timor-Leste’s eventual victory, but the whole struggle seems forgotten.

We need litanies or recitations or monuments to these victories, so that they are landmarks in everyone’s mind. More broadly, shifts in, say, the status of women are easily overlooked by people who don’t remember that, a few decades ago, reproductive rights were not yet a concept, and there was no recourse for exclusion, discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, most forms of rape, and other crimes against women the legal system did not recognise or even countenance. None of the changes were inevitable, either – people fought for them and won them.

S ocial, cultural or political change does not work in predictable ways or on predictable schedules. The month before the Berlin Wall fell, almost no one anticipated that the Soviet bloc was going to disintegrate all of a sudden (thanks to many factors, including the tremendous power of civil society, nonviolent direct action and hopeful organising going back to the 1970s), any more than anyone, even the participants, foresaw the impact that the Arab spring or Occupy Wall Street or a host of other great uprisings would have. We don’t know what is going to happen, or how, or when, and that very uncertainty is the space of hope.

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can’t believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them and what real changes have emerged because of them, even if not always in the most obvious or recognisable ways.

Change is rarely straightforward. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds. A young man’s suicide triggers an uprising that inspires other uprisings, but the incident was a spark; the bonfire it lit was laid by activist networks and ideas about civil disobedience, and by the deep desire for justice and freedom that exists everywhere.

It’s important to ask not only what those moments produced in the long run but what they were in their heyday. If people find themselves living in a world in which some hopes are realised and some joys are incandescent and some boundaries between individuals and groups are lowered, even for an hour or a day or several months, that matters. Memory of joy and liberation can become a navigational tool, an identity, a gift.

Paul Goodman famously wrote, “Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!” It’s an argument for tiny and temporary victories, and for the possibility of partial victories in the absence or even the impossibility of total victories.

Total victory has always seemed like a secular equivalent of paradise: a place where all the problems are solved and there’s nothing to do, a fairly boring place. The absolutists of the old left imagined that victory would, when it came, be total and permanent, which is practically the same as saying that victory was and is impossible and will never come.

It is, in fact, more than possible. It is something that has arrived in innumerable ways, small and large and often incremental, but not in that way that was widely described and expected. So victories slip by unheralded. Failures are more readily detected.

And then every now and then, the possibilities explode. In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a “we” that did not until then exist, at least not as an entity with agency and identity and potency; new possibilities suddenly emerge, or that old dream of a just society re-emerges and – at least for a little while – shines. Utopia is sometimes the goal. It is often embedded in the moment itself, and it is a hard moment to explain, since it usually involves hardscrabble ways of living, squabbles and, eventually, disillusion and factionalism. But also more ethereal things: the discovery of personal and collective power, the realisation of dreams, the birth of bigger dreams, a sense of connection that is as emotional as it is political, and lives that change and do not revert to older ways even when the glory subsides.

Sometimes the earth closes over this moment and it has no obvious consequences; sometimes empires crumble and ideologies fall away like shackles. But you don’t know beforehand. People in official institutions devoutly believe they hold the power that matters, though the power we grant them can often be taken back; the violence commanded by governments and militaries often fails, and nonviolent direct-action campaigns often succeed.

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, and of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant stays asleep.

Together we are very powerful, and we have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that, yes, we can change the world because we have many times before. You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Authors: Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale Categories: Ethics , Epistemology ,  Philosophy of Religion , Social & Political Philosophy Word Count: 994

Hope is ubiquitous: family members express hope that we find love and happiness, politicians call for hope in response to tragedies, and optimists urge people to keep their hopes up. We also tell ourselves to maintain hope, to find it, or in darker moments, to give it up. We hope for frivolous things, too.

But what is hope? Can hope be rational or irrational? Is hope valuable? Is it ever dangerous?

This essay reviews recent important answers to these questions with the goal of better understanding hope. [1]

Karl Robert Bodek and Kurt Conrad Löw, One Spring, Gurs Camp, 1941

1. what is hope.

The typical starting point for analyzing hope is that it involves a desire for an outcome and a belief that the outcome’s occurring is at least possible . The sense of possibility isn’t merely physical possibility, for we can hope that, say, God perform some miracle that violates the law of gravity. Philosophers tend to think that a person can hope for anything they believe is possible (no matter how low the odds), though it is a separate question whether a hope is rational or not, and to what degree. [2]

But the belief-desire account of hope appears insufficient: we might desire an outcome, and believe that the outcome is possible, yet have absolutely no hope that it will happen! [3] A prisoner facing execution may desire a pardon, believe that a pardon is possible , yet be altogether hopeless that he will be pardoned. [4]

Hope, then, requires more than a desire for something and belief in its possibility. What else?

Luc Bovens argues that hope also requires positive conscious thoughts or “mental imaging” about the desired outcome: basically, fantasizing about the desired outcome occurring. [5] The prisoner facing execution thus hopes for a pardon only if he has pleasant thoughts or imaginations about being pardoned. If hope involves, beyond belief and desire, pleasant thoughts about the outcome occurring, we might be able to distinguish being hopeful for something from being hopeless about it: hope involves pleasant thoughts whereas hopelessness involves unpleasant ones.

Adrienne M. Martin questions whether Bovens’s view adequately distinguishes hope from hopelessness. She argues that a prisoner who is hopeless about the possibility of an overturned conviction may still desire the outcome, believe it possible, and fantasize about being pardoned. [6] To distinguish hope from hopelessness, Martin defends an “incorporation analysis” of hope: [7] the inmate incorporates his desire into his plans, believing that he has reasons to plan and act (e.g., with his lawyer) about the prospects of freedom.

But does hope really require that hopeful people believe that they have reasons to feel, act, and plan in accordance with their desire, as Martin’s view requires? Michael Milona and Katie Stockdale argue that it does not. [8] We sometimes wholly reject our hopes (e.g., to return to a previous bad romantic relationship), believing that that we have no reason for what we hope for. Rejecting a hope, or believing that we should not have that hope, does not mean that this hope is any less of a hope , contrary to what the incorporation analysis suggests: hopes we wish we didn’t have are hopes nevertheless.

Milona and Stockdale develop the idea that hope is akin not to a judgment, but rather, to a perceptual experience . Just as perceivers often judge their perceptions to be misguided (e.g., at magic shows), so too may hopers judge their hopes are misguided. Hope then involves, beyond belief and desire, a perceptual-like experience of reasons to pursue the desired outcome, or to prepare themselves for its possible occurrence. So, in hoping we may experience reasons to, say, return to an ex partner without believing such reasons exist.

In sum, there continue to be significant debates about the nature of hope, most notably what needs to be added to hope (if anything) beyond mere belief and desire.

2. The Rationality and Value of Hope

Hope is generally thought to be epistemically rational if one’s belief about the possibility (or in some cases, the specific likelihood) of the outcome is correct in light of the available evidence. [9]

Hope may be practically rational in a variety of ways as well. Hope is thought to contribute to well-being, motivate the achievement of goals, and inspire courageous action, among other things. [10]

Beyond epistemic and practical rationality, some hopes may even be rational because they are constitutive of who we are (e.g., a member of a certain religion), and to lose such fundamental hopes would be to lose part of our identity. [11]

3. The Dangers of Hope

Hope is not without risks.

Thwarted hopes can result in strong feelings of disappointment. Hope may also be a source of wishful thinking, leading people to see the world as tilting in their favor despite the evidence. [12] For example, hope that the problems of climate change will be effectively addressed might lead someone not to bother with climate change activism or to take any personal responsibility to work to mitigate it.

Hope can also be exploited, such as when politicians take advantage of the hopes of people in positions of powerlessness. For example, people who desperately hope for greater economic security may be influenced to accept policies that primarily serve the politician’s own ends rather than the people’s.

These and other dangers of hope might lead us to explore alternative emotions to hope. Stockdale argues that in the face of persistent injustices, bitterness (i.e., anger without hope) might be a justified emotional response. [13] The relevance of hope to politics and society has also inspired investigation of whether hope is a democratic or political virtue [14] and whether a form of radical hope is needed in the face of cultural devastation and other severe hardships. [15]

4. Conclusion

In a world where our needs and desires are so often met with uncertainty, hope tends to emerge. Philosophy has much to contribute to understanding this phenomenon, and the potential value and risks of hope to all aspects of our lives: personally, socially, morally, intellectually, religiously, politically and more.

[1] Only recently have philosophers given the topic sustained attention.  Some discussions of hope are found in the philosophy of religion (see Augustine, c. 420 [1999]), in existentialist writings (see Marcel, 2010), and in bioethics (see, e.g., Simpson (2004); Murdoch and Scott (2010); McMillan, Walker, and Hope (2014)).

[2] See Chignell (2014) for a discussion of Immanuel Kant’s defense of the rationality of hoping for miracles, divine grace, and a truly ethical society.

[3] Despair has long been considered to be the attitude which is the opposite of hope. This view traces back to St. Thomas Aquinas who argues that despair is the contrary to hope insofar as it implies “withdrawal” from the desired object while hope implies “approach” ( Summa Theologiae II-II.40.4).

[4] The claim that the standard account fails to distinguish hope from hopelessness (or in his terms, despair) is due to Ariel Meirav (2009).

[5] Bovens (1999).

[6] Martin (2013, 18-19).

[7] Moellendorf (2006) defends a similar theory.

[8] Milona and Stockdale (2018).

[9] Martin (2013, 37).

[10] See Bovens (1999) and Kadlac (2015).

[11] Blöser and Stahl (2017).

[12] Bovens (1999).

[13] Stockdale (2017).

[14] See Moellendorf (2006) and Mittleman (2009).

[15] Lear (2006).

Aquinas, Thomas. [1485] 1948. Summa Theologiae . Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 5 vols. Benziger Brothers.

Augustine. [c. 420] 1999. The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Charity . Trans. Bruce Harbert. Ed. Boniface Ramsey. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press.

Blöser, Claudia, and Titus Stahl. 2017. “Fundamental Hope and Practical Identity.” Philosophical Papers 46 (3): 345–71.

Bovens, Luc. 1999. “The Value of Hope.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (3): 667–81.

Chignell, Andrew. (2014). “Rational Hope, Possibility, and Divine Action.” in Gordon E.

Michalson (ed.), Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 98-117.

Kadlac, Adam. 2015. “The Virtue of Hope.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2): 337–54.

Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Marcel, Gabriel. 2010. Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope . Updated ed. South Bend, Ind: St. Augustine’s Press.

Martin, Adrienne. 2013. How We Hope: A Moral Psychology . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McMillan, John, Simon Walker, and Tony Hope. 2014. “Valuing Hope.” Monash Bioethics Review 32 (1–2): 33–42.

Meirav, Ariel. 2009. “The Nature of Hope.” Ratio 22 (2): 216–33.

Milona, Michael. 2018. “Finding Hope.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy , February, 1–20.

Milona, Michael, and Katie Stockdale. 2018. “A Perceptual Theory of Hope.” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 5.

Mittleman, Alan. 2009. Hope in a Democratic Age: Philosophy, Religion, and Political Theory . New York: Oxford University Press.

Moellendorf, Darrel. 2006. “Hope as a Political Virtue.” Philosophical Papers 35 (3): 413–33.

Murdoch, Charles E., and Christopher Thomas Scott. 2010. “Stem Cell Tourism and the Power of Hope.” The American Journal of Bioethics 10 (5): 16–23.

Simpson, Christy. 2004. “When Hope Makes Us Vulnerable: A Discussion of Patient-Healthcare Provider Interactions in the Context of Hope.” Bioethics 18 (5): 428–47.

Stockdale, Katie. 2017. “Losing Hope: Injustice and Moral Bitterness.” Hypatia 32 (2): 363–79.

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About the Authors

Milona Michael is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University. His principal research interests are at the intersection of ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. michaelmilona.com

Katie Stockdale is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria. Her research is primarily in ethics (especially moral psychology) and feminist philosophy. kstockdale.com

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How hope can keep you happier and healthier, hope is more than just positive thinking..

Hope can erode when we perceive threats to our way of life, and these days, plenty are out there. As we age , we may struggle with a tragic loss or chronic disease. As we watch the news, we see our political system polarized , hopelessly locked in chaos. The coronavirus spreads wider daily ; U.S. markets signaled a lack of hope with a Dow Jones free fall. Losing hope sometimes leads to suicide .

When there is no hope—when people cannot picture a desired end to their struggles—they lose the motivation to endure. As professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, I’ve studied positive psychology, forgiveness, wellness and the science of hope for more than 40 years. My website offers free resources and tools to help its readers live a more hopeful life.

What is hope?

First, hope is not Pollyannaish optimism— the assumption that a positive outcome is inevitable. Instead, hope is a motivation to persevere toward a goal or end state, even if we’re skeptical that a positive outcome is likely. Psychologists tell us hope involves activity, a can-do attitude and a belief that we have a pathway to our desired outcome. Hope is the willpower to change and the way-power to bring about that change.

With teens and with young or middle-aged adults, hope is a bit easier. But for older adults, it’s a bit harder. Aging often means running up against obstacles that appear unyielding—like recurring health or financial or family issues that just don’t seem to go away. Hope for older adults has to be “sticky,” persevering, a “ mature hope .”

How to build hope

Now the good news: this study , from Harvard’s “ Human Flourishing Program ,” recently published. Researchers examined the impact of hope on nearly 13,000 people with an average age of 66. They found those with more hope throughout their lives had better physical health, better health behaviors, better social support and a longer life. Hope also led to fewer chronic health problems, less depression, less anxiety and a lower risk of cancer.

So if maintaining hope in the long run is so good for us, how do we increase it? Or build hope if it’s MIA? Here are my four suggestions:

Attend a motivational speech —or watch, read or listen to one online, through YouTube, a blog or podcast. That increases hope, although usually the fix is short-lived. How can you build longer-term hope?

Engage with a religious or spiritual community. This has worked for millennia. Amidst a community of like believers, people have drawn strength, found peace and experienced the elevation of the human spirit, just by knowing there is something or someone much larger than them.

Forgive. Participating in a forgiveness group , or completing a forgiveness do-it-yourself workbook , builds hope, say scientists . It also reduces depression and anxiety, and increases (perhaps this is obvious) your capacity to forgive. That’s true even with long-held grudges. I’ve personally found that successfully forgiving someone provides a sense of both the willpower and way-power to change.

Choose a “hero of hope.” Some have changed history: Nelson Mandela endured 27 years of imprisonment yet persevered to build a new nation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought hope to millions for a decade during the Great Depression. Ronald Reagan brought hope to a world that seemed forever mired in the Cold War. From his fourth State of the Union address: “Tonight, I’ve spoken of great plans and great dreams. They’re dreams we can make come true. Two hundred years of American history should have taught us that nothing is impossible.”

Hope gets you unstuck

Hope changes systems that seem stuck. Katherine Johnson , the black mathematician whose critical role in the early days of NASA and the space race was featured in the movie “Hidden Figures,” recently died at age 101. The movie (and the book on which it was based) brought to light her persistence against a system that seemed forever stuck. Bryan Stevenson, who directs the Equal Justice Initiative , and the subject of the movie “Just Mercy,” has successfully fought to help those wrongly convicted or incompetently defended to get off death row.

Stevenson laments that he could not help everyone who needed it; he concluded that he lived in a broken system, and that, in fact, he too was a broken man. Yet he constantly reminded himself of what he had told everyone he tried to help: “Each of us,” he said, “is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” Hope changes all of us. By regaining his hope, Bryan Stevenson’s example inspires us.

Regardless of how hard we try, we cannot eliminate threats to hope. Bad stuff happens. But there are the endpoints of persistent hope: We become healthier and our relationships are happier. We can bring about that hope by buoying our willpower, bolstering our persistence, finding pathways to our goals and dreams, and looking for heroes of hope. And just perhaps, one day, we too can be such a hero.

This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article .

About the Author

Everett L. Worthington Jr.

Everett L. Worthington, Jr., Ph.D. , is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-editor (with Nathaniel G. Wade) of Handbook of Forgiveness , 2nd ed. (2020, Routledge). He studies forgiveness, humility, and other character strengths and virtues within positive psychology.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Hope — The Meaning of Hope and Its Role in Our Life

The Meaning of Hope and Its Role in Our Life

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Writing a hope essay will remind you that any ordeal is easier to bear if you believe in future relief, in other words, if there is hope. We start each day with hope, without even realizing it. Hope motivates us to live. We hope for something better even when nothing is certain, when there are difficulties ahead, because hope is essentially the expectation that all bad things will be overcome – many hope essay samples mention this point. We all hope that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. Hope essays emphasize that people cannot live without hope, so we must try not to despair even in the most difficult situations. Romans had a saying: dum spiro spero, which means “while I breathe, I hope” – it’s a great motto to live by. Check out samples of essays on hope below for ideas to include in your essay.

Having none or fewer symptoms and being back to how your life was before without the illness is clinical recovery. Personal healing is a unique, deeply personal process of transforming one’s values, attitudes, skills, goals, and roles to better ones. Individual recovery is living a contributing, satisfying, and hopeful life...

Spirituality is critical in the delivery of care since it affects the decisions made and patient’s perception on the care plan.  Spiritual evaluation is the procedure of determining patient’s spiritual needs concerning health. The process assists caregivers to understand patients’ faith, needs, values and biases as linked to health care....

Words: 1163

The art of embracing an optimistic mindset regardless of the circumstances at hand describes extensively the virtue of hope (MacInnis a person who will give them a reason to smile trough the ugly phases of the life that they face; and actualize the significance of hope in them....

Words: 1739

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The American dream, a long-standing vision, reflects the hope that through hard work and commitment, one will achieve political strength, economic prosperity, and endless love. During the Roaring Twenties, people put up masks to hide who they really were. Fitzgerald conveys in Great Gatsby that the American dream is a...

The first clue to the plot of a story is continually the title. I have read a great number of books the place the author had to take the reader deep into twenty pages of reading to realize what the e book was about. Tricia Downing on the other hand...

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76 Hope Essay Titles & Examples

The hope essay examples below will come in handy if you’re exploring scriptures, Bible stories, or the concept of faith itself. Besides, our experts have prepared creative topics about hope for you to check.

🏆 Best Topics about Hope & Essay Examples

📌 most interesting hope essay titles, 👍 good hope titles for essays & research papers.

• “Hope II” by Gustav Klimt: Formal Analysis The painting is called Hope II, which indicates that the artist wanted to emphasize not the doom and sadness of the death of a child but the hope of the women depicted in the painting.
• “Hope of Children” Charity Organization Operations In addition, developing countries experience wars weakening the countries’ economy thus unable to provide for the basic needs of the less privileged in the society.
• Focusing on Faten’s Personal Choices as Presented in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami Hence, Faten’s first appearance in the book allows the reader to understand the extent to which Faten is committed to her goals and faith: “She wore a gray, pilled sweater and an ankle-length denim skirt, […]
• Concepts of Optimism and Hope Hope is a feeling inherent in a person that stimulates him to move on, to believe in the best. I would also like to create a strong family, become a good person and do something […]
• Hope in the Christian Metanarrative Creation refers to the original period where God created the world and everything that is in it, with Adam and Eve living happily in the garden of Eden.
• Hope in Humanities Future The first area of concern is the consumption of world resources, which appears to be skewed in favor of the developed nations.
• Children of Men: Hope After Political and Moral Degradation The world presented by Cuaron is incredibly grim and desolate, and he convinces the viewer of total hopelessness through cinematic effects and the narrative of the film itself.
• “This Compost” Gives Hope and Makes People Think In the end of the poem the reader becomes sure that there is nothing to be afraid of the planet will regenerate.
• The Themes of Hope and Trauma in “Harry Potter” The inciting incident of the series is a giant man breaking down the door and telling Harry about his horrible legacy.
• The Center A Place of Hope: Medical Organization The organization is affordable with the help of the treatment program that aims at working with the patients to achieve the best possible plan for treatment within their budget.
• Global Poverty Project: A Beacon of Hope in the Fight Against Extreme Poverty The organization works with partners worldwide to increase awareness and understanding of global poverty and inspire people to take action to end it.
• Installation of Hope in Group Therapy It is possible to establish that installation has a prominent force in the group through the NEO-Five-Factor Inventory which can be used to determine the viability of group hope.
• Social Significance of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” This fact undoubtedly also influenced the work of Emily Dickinson, and it is in it that the social significance of the poem “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” is reflected.
• Nurses and Concept of Hope Nursing practitioners should try to encourage their patients and their caregivers to have this kind of attitude in the most desperate situations.
• Rebecca Solnit: Hope Is the Embrace of the Unknown This paper will seek to review the current LGBTQ social justice movement, aimed towards elimination of systemic discrimination, and test if Solnit’s assertion that the grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of […]
• Making Hope Possible to Bring the Necessary Environmental Changes The persistence of various hazards and potential disasters can be regarded as some of the reasons for the exploration of the peculiarities of current communication patterns on the matter.
• Mankind — Doomed From Birth or Hope in Life To him this is a reflection of the sinful soul of man which indulges in different immoral and wicked thoughts and actions from the time of infancy.
• Cedric in “A Hope in the Unseen” by Ron Suskind In the school in Ballou, we see that good performance is scorned and yet he is struggling to be a good performer.
• Ethical End-of-Life Care: False Sense of Hope Another side of the issue is that patients and their relatives may frequently find it hard to accept that nothing can be done to improve their situation.
• Soaring Hope: Imagining Life as It Ought to Be The main message of the book comprises the values of hope, imagination, and optimism of Christians and the church in the world.
• The Hope Poster by Shepard Fairey I believe the poster I did could have made the fit in anti-drug abuse campaigns of the 1940s with ease, primarily because the artistic style belongs to the same period.
• “Beacon of Hope” Social Center in Savannah The majority of the people who are served by the Beacon of Hope Centre are the elderly, homeless, disabled, needy women and children.
• Dickinson’s “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers” Poem At the beginning of the poem, the first two lines introduce the bird, and the narrator describes it as the creature that continues singing “without the words”.
• “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers” by Emily Dickinson On the example of the selected poem, the author’s style will be discussed through the lens of her perception of the world. Further, the scheme of the poem will be considered.
• Detroit Poverty and “Focus Hope” Organization There is a great number of factors and issues that lead to a certain part of the population to live in poverty.”Focus Hope” is an organization that tries to alleviate the suffering of those in […]
• Prototypical Symbols of Hope in Novels Probably the main aspect of how the theme of hope is being explored in James and the Giant Peach is that the author made a deliberate point in referring to hope in one’s life, as […]
• Correlation Study of the Relationship Between Individual Resilience, Hope, Stress and Humour This is advisable to ensure that the attitude, approach, and performance of individuals remain apposite and competitive within the organization. From these findings, it is possible to formulate a hypothesis thus; Hypothesis 1: That there […]
• Marketing and Strategic Plan: Hope Network Hospital Nurses and caregivers in the facility will be expected to embrace the best medical principles in order to support the slogan.
• Project Hope International The organization’s strategy in imparting knowledge among the young people of the community is mainly based on the principle that, the younger a person is introduced to information technology, the higher the chances of using […]
• A non-profit organization Angel of Hope As part of the obligation of the leadership team of Angel of Hope, it is possible to communicate unmistakably with donors and organizations that will present gifts and funds they require.
• Charity Organization “Hope for the Nations” Analysis It is also necessary to mention that it is easy to find information on the history of the organization. Though, the most important is information on the projects and the ways to donate.
• Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a Camusian Absurd Hero, That’s to Say He Has No Hope Consequently, after posing his concern of suicide and life value, he notes that the voluntary death process indicates acknowledgement of the importance of suffering, and the lack of a weighty reason for living.
• Book Marketing Campaign and Competitive Environment It is necessary to analyze the target audience of this book or product, the elements of the marketing mix that have been included in its promotion.
• Hopes and Fears in Regard to the “Network Society” On the other hand, the importance of mass media and communication means has led to prevailing role of computers and other instant messaging devices over personal communication, and the resulting depersonalization of human relations.
• Theology of Hope: Moltmann and Pannenberg Based on the founders of the dogma, theology of hope analyses eschatology from the resurrection of the Messiah onwards rather from the creation of the universe.
• Traditional and Feminist Lens of Marvell and Hope
• Truth He Has No Hope Who Never Had A Fear
• The Hope for the Phoenix That Gave Optimism to the Life of Montag
• Tremendous Hope For Mankind
• The Roots of Debate in Education and the Hope of Dialogue
• The Pleasures Of Hope What Millions Died That Caesar Might Be Great
• What Is Our Hope For The Future
• The Republican Party Offers America its Best Hope for the Future
• Understanding Hope from the Bible’s Perspective
• Theme of Hope in Jane Harrison’s Play, Stolen
• Transitional Resources : Hope, Opportunity And Recovery
• Quasi Experiment Of Outcome Of Hope Program: Drug Abuse
• Understanding Hope and its Implications for Consumer Behavior: I Hope, Therefore I Consume
• The Myth Of Co Parenting By Hope Edelman Analysis
• Portryal of Andy as a Symbol of Hope in Shawshank Redemption
• Stem Cell: A Promise of Hope for the Future
• Treatments That Offer Hope To Hair Loss Sufferers
• Strong Female Characters in Sedgwicks Hope Leslie
• The World ‘s Greatest Hero Represents Ideals Like Hope
• Suffering on Hope: Comparing Prometheus and Io
• Unfortunate Irony “Hope” Ariel Dorfman
• The Concept of Hope in Little Princess, a Book by Conor Grennan
• There Is No Hope of Doing Perfect Research
• The Danger Of Hope By John Steinbeck
• Theologies Rooted in the Concept of Hope
• Hope Is the Most Powerful Force in the Universe
• The Cross Symbol Of Hope
• The Role of Hope, Spirituality and Religious Practice in Adolescents’ Life Satisfaction: Longitudinal Findings
• Some Hope For Americas Troubled Youth
• The Catcher in the Rye Is a Novel Which Evokes Hope and Despair for Holden Caulfield
• The Overall Tone of Hope Through the Word South in Last Poem, a Poem by Bo Juyi
• The Theme of Hope in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• The Difference Hope Makes A Person Can Make Or Break Them
• The Valuation of Hope Value for Real Estate Development
• The Audacity of Hope: A Rhetorical Analysis
• The Techniques Used by Emily Dickinson in Hope is the Thing with Feathers
• The Relationship Between Hope and Adherence to Medication for HIV Patients
• The Untold Hope In The Slumbered Island Of Boracay
• The Concept of Reconciliation in Faith, Hope and Reconciliation, a Speech by Faith Bandler
• The Loss of Hope in Dante’s Inferno
• Thirteen Conversations about One Thing: Revealing Conversations on Change and Hope
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Essay On Hope – 1000 Words Essay

The word “hope” is a word that has so many different meanings to so many different people. This is because we all have different definitions and thoughts on what hope means to us. Hope can be defined as something that gives you the belief or desire that a specific thing will happen or exist in the future; a feeling of expectation and desire for something desired but not present; an object of hope, especially one characterized by immortality. One such example would be having hope for the survival of life on earth.

Another example would be having hope for a certain person or group’s success, such as hoping your basketball team wins the game.

For myself, I think that hope is defined as something that will happen in the future. With this definition, I would say that I have hope for the future of our world and society, such as hoping there will be no war or fighting among groups of people anymore. Another hopeful subject would be hoping that there will be no major catastrophes and therefore allowing us to continue to live on in peace and harmony. For me personally, my definition of hope is something that never dies no matter what may happen in life. I think this is a good way to live, even if your hopes aren’t fulfilled, at least you had hope for them and they will always be there. If you are someone who does not have hope for the future of humanity or something else then that’s ok, maybe you can find hope in the little things in life like having fun with a friend or family member.

I believe that anyone can have hope for anything no matter what it may be. Hope isn’t something that allows you to feel a certain way about life all the time, but it’s a frame of mind that gives us reason to keep going despite all odds against us. Hope is the strongest emotion because it is something you can’t feel unless you have hope.

Hope is one of the most important and powerful emotions that humans experience. Hope brings us forward in life, provides hope for the future, and makes us all feel better about ourselves and our lives. Without hope, we may as well give up on life due to the fact that we will never regain what has been lost or lost again. Hope is what gives meaning to life, it allows us to get an understanding of things we may not have before, and most importantly it allows us to continue living on despite everything we go through in life. Most would agree that without trust there would be no hope.

For me, hope is something that you can’t feel unless there is some kind it perception to it. I believe that hope is a state of mind that allows people to keep going in life and achieve things they would never have thought possible. Hope allows us to overcome obstacles and fears placed before us because we have the belief or the desire that this will end up well in the future. Our world would be much different if mankind had more hope within them, even though I think every person has their own idea of what hope is, there are some general guidelines that everyone could agree with if you asked them what they thought “hope” was.

I think hope is a very big thing to have in life and it is something that can make you feel a certain way or keep you going when things are tough. Hope is an emotion that people should feel because without any hope we would probably just give up, but with hope, we can keep on living and striving for what we want. There are many different ways people look at hope and there are some very passionate beliefs about this emotion as well. I think most agree however that without hope there would be no one who would fight for anything or anything anyone else would do, so it’s only natural that most believe everyone has to have some kind of hope in life.

Hope is one of the most powerful emotions to ever be experienced in life, it motivates and encourages us to keep going no matter what may happen in our lives. Hope gives you the inspiration to achieve your goals no matter how hard or impossible they may seem. People believe that without hope there would be no motivation to do anything, but with hope as a motivation, you can accomplish many things that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Without any hope, we might as well give up on life since we will never achieve what we want and just live for eternity torturing ourselves with negative thoughts about our lives and our current situation. Hope has the ability to get us through anything we go through in life. Hope gives us a reason to keep living and fighting against all odds, and most importantly it makes us believe that whatever we do, will eventually happen no matter what. Hope is something that comes with the perception of things that you can’t feel unless you have it for yourself.

Hope gives us the ability to fight against whatever life throws at us in order to continue living and moving forward with our lives. Without hope, I do not think we would be able to do anything at all, because it would make us feel like giving up on everything without even trying. If people did not have any kind of hope then they would probably just give up on life due to their situation making them unhappy and angry.

Always being hopeful and believing in our lives is the most important thing we can do no matter what we go through in life.

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”

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Essay About Money – 2000 Words Essay

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187 Hope Essay Topics: Ideas for Definition Essays, Literature Papers & More

Hope is a topic that has been discussed throughout philosophy’s history and in all Western philosophical traditions. It plays a vital role in every aspect of human life, such as religion, politics, and relationships. Hope also enables people to handle events with a mindset encouraging them to look ahead enthusiastically and positively.

In this article, our expert team has collected creative and catchy hope titles for essays that will come in handy!

• 🔝 Top 10 Hope Essays Topics

✍️ Hope Essay Prompts

• 🔤 Definition Essay on Hope
• 🙏 Essay on Hope and Faith

📚 Hope Essay Topics for Papers on Literature

🕊️ more great titles about hope, 📝 essay on hope: outline, 🔗 references, 🔝 top 10 hope essay topics.

• The philosophy of hope.
• The impact of hope on society.
• Why is the concept of hope important?
• Hope from a psychological perspective.
• Why do hope and anxiety accompany each other?
• Hope in Kant’s studies.
• The cross as a symbol of hope.
• Hope: personal experience.
• How not to lose hope?
• Example of hope in literature.

Have you ever felt a lack of inspiration when writing a school or college essay about hope? Not this time! We have prepared creative essay prompts that will aid you in receiving the highest grades!

Is Hope a Blessing or a Curse: Essay Prompt

The Greeks considered hope the most harmful of all evils because it hindered people from accepting their fate. In addition, hope is concerned with what has not yet occurred. So, it is natural that the higher our hopes for the future, the greater our disappointment when they are unmet.

On the other hand, research finds that people are more likely to accomplish their goals when they have hope. In your essay, you can provide the advantages and disadvantages of having hope, analyze them, and come to a conclusion.

Prompt for Essay about Faith, Hope, and Love

Faith, hope, and love are central to Christianity. Some Christian churches consider them theological virtues , each reflecting principles that define humanity’s relationship with God. In your essay about faith, hope, and love, you can focus on the following aspects:

• The role of these 3 virtues in religion.
• Importance of faith, hope, and love in everyday life.
• The example of faith, hope, and love from your experience, a film, or a book.
• Key verses about these virtues in the Bible.

What Gives You Hope for the Future: Essay Prompt

Hope might be among the most challenging things to find in terrible circumstances, but one must cling to it when things get bad. Being hopeful means believing in a better tomorrow, even if today everything goes wrong.

If you need help determining what gives you hope for the future, consider these tips:

• Think about the ups and downs that you have experienced.
• Try to find things that make you happy and inspired.
• Create a list of items you are thankful for and explain why.
• Look for some stories of hopeful people or ask friends to share their experiences.

Why Is Hope Important: Essay Prompt

Hope is one of the most powerful emotions since it urges people to keep going regardless of what happens in their lives. It also provides motivation to pursue goals, no matter how difficult or unattainable they seem, and fosters a positive attitude toward daily issues.

To highlight the importance of hope, find the answers to the following questions:

• How does hope help people overcome difficulties?
• Why is hope one of the greatest motivators?
• What is the impact of hope on mental health?
• Why is hope a strength and protective factor?

🔤 Definition Essay on Hope: Topic Ideas

A definition essay aims to thoroughly explain a specific concept. If you’re looking for ideas for your definition essay on hope, here are some topics to consider:

• What is the definition of hope in psychology?
• The essence of hope in Christianity .
• Hope in Hinduism as a concept of desire and wish.
• The focus of hope on economic and social empowerment in culture.
• What does the term hope mean in Judaism ?
• Hope in literature as a motivating force for change in the plot.
• How can hope be defined in the healthcare industry?
• Hope as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals.
• How did ancient people define hope?
• Barack Obama’s psychology of hope: definition and peculiarities.
• The emotional competency of hope in the modern world.
• How do different cultures define and value the concept of hope?
• The role of hope in art: from ancient to modern times.
• The interpretation and explanation of hope by different philosophical currents .
• How is the concept of hope reflected in the works of different eras and genres?
• The impact of AI technology on the perception and expression of hope.
• Hope in the educational process: features.
• How has the understanding of hope changed over history?
• The relationship between the concept of hope and a general sense of happiness .
• Hope in religious beliefs and its manifestations in believers’ behaviors.

🙏 Essay on Hope and Faith: Interesting Topics

Faith and hope are closely interrelated concepts. If you need to write an essay on hope and faith, check out our writing ideas:

• The link between faith and hope in psychiatry.
• Three Faiths: Buddhism, Shintoism, and Bahai Religion .
• How do faith and hope help people to deal with uncertainty?
• The influence of hope and faith on mental health.
• Hope and faith as a foundation for religious practice and rituals .
• Health Care Provider and Faith Diversity .
• What is the difference between faith and hope?
• The role of hope and faith in the healing process .
• Hope and faith as a source of moral values.
• Christian Faith and Psychology: Allies Model .
• How does faith nurture and sustain hope?
• The nature of faith and hope in different cultures .
• European and Greek Heritage and Health Beliefs .
• Hope and faith from a philosophical perspective.
• The influence of hope and faith on the decision-making process.
• How do religious communities promote hope and faith?
• Religious Beliefs and Political Decisions .
• Religious hope and faith in the context of a personal tragedy.
• Hope and faith: the role in driving social change.
• Social Influence and Its Effects on People’s Beliefs and Behavior .
• The role of hope and faith in overcoming depression and anxiety disorders.
• What do hope and faith have in common?
• Political Beliefs in Changing Leadership .
• The thin line between hope and faith in oncology.
• Religious hope and faith as a source of the meaning of life.
• How Beliefs Can Shape a Person’s Reality .
• Why is hope so important to our faith?
• The evolution of faith and hope in human life.

Bible Study Questions on Hope

• Why, according to the Bible , hope is not a fleeting feeling?
• What messages of hope are present in the Book of Hebrews?
• Marriage and the Family: The Biblical Ideal & Modern Practice .
• What does the Book of Romans say about hope?
• How does the Psalmist convey hope in the face of adversity and uncertainty?
• What role does hope play in the teachings of Proverbs?
• Similarities in Family Values: The Aeneid and the Bible .
• How does the Bible teach us to be confident in our hope?
• What is the connection between hope and repentance in the Book of Lamentations?
• Why does true hope come as a gift by trusting God ?
• Relation Between God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit .
• Which stories from the Bible can help us learn more about hope?
• How does the book of Psalms use poetic language to express feelings of hope?
• The Nature of God, Humanity, Jesus, and Salvation .
• What role does hope play in the teachings of Jesus?
• How does the concept of hope relate to the idea of forgiveness in the Bible?
• How does Noah’s story with the flood illustrate the notion of hope?
• Several Theological Perspectives in the Understanding of the Bible, Its Interpretation and Issues .
• What lessons about hope may be derived from the Israelites’ experiences in the desert?
• How does the Book of Revelation present a vision of ultimate hope?

Are you searching for hope essay titles in literature ? In the sections below, you’ll find topics about this theme in the poem “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers and other literary works.

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers Essay: Topic Ideas

• “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers as a hymn of praise to hope.
• The power of hope as a key idea in the poem.
• “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers: critical features of the poetic tone.
• The metaphor of hope in Emily Dickinson’s poem .
• Hope as a feathered creature in the poem.
• The concept of hope in “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers.
• Why does Dickinson represent hope in her poem as a living thing?
• The symbolism of feathers in the poem “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers.
• The abstract form of hope by Dickinson: the use of imagery and figurative language .
• Soul as a hope’s home in”Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers.
• How does Dickinson describe the paradoxical nature of hope in her poem?
• The use of poetic devices in “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers.
• The impact of Dickinson’s poem on readers’ perceptions of hope.
• Dickinson’s “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers: comparison of hope and despair.
• The peculiarities of “Hope” Is the Thing with Feathers title.

Hope Theme in Literature: More Essay Titles

• The Diary of Anne Frank: how hope saved lives during the Holocaust.
• The theme of hope in Louis’s journey in Hillenbrand’s Unbroken .
• The power of hope in the face of difficulty in A Raisin in the Sun.
• How does the author convey the idea of hope in Jane Eyre?
• Orwell’s 1984: The theme of lost hope for the future.
• Disillusionment of hope in The Great Gatsby .
• “Hope” by Emily Bronte as a poetic interpretation of hope.
• The American Dream in the Play “Death of a Salesman.”
• The nature of hope in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Night by Elie Wiesel : the concept of hope as a lifeline.
• How is the theme of hope highlighted in Life of Pi?
• Hemingway’s works and their connection with hope in the face of adversity.
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: the hope for justice and equality.
• The value of hope and humanity in All Quiet on the Western Front.
• Romeo and Juliet: hope’s vulnerability in a world of quarreling families.
• How does The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reveal the various perspectives of hope?
• The impact of hope on humanity’s future.
• How does hope help people cope with mental and physical disorders ?
• Personal Beliefs. Thought Control .
• Loss of hope: practical methods and strategies to stay motivated.
• The role of hope in students’ academic achievement .
• Hope as a source of energy and a positive mindset.
• The impact of hope on creativity in art and literature.
• Restoring Hope Counselling Home for Youth .
• How can hope assist in raising children?
• Hope as an instrument of adaptation to changes in modern society.
• Emotional regulation through hope: strategies and effectiveness.
• Supernaturalism: The Existence of God and the Meaning of a Human Life .
• How does hope aid in social progress and prosperity?
• The efficiency of hope in goal achievement.
• The Five Pillars of Islam and Its Major Teachings .
• How do people stay hopeful in the face of uncertainty?
• The influence of hope in business and entrepreneurship.
• Hope as a powerful motivator in conflict resolution .
• The relationship between hope and stress management.
• The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ .
• Hope and its influence on the development of emotional intelligence.
• How does hope affect the ethical issues of technological development ?
• The value of hope in the maintenance of positive family relations.
• The role of hope in sports achievements and overcoming difficulties.
• Positive Reinforcement Concepts Discussion .
• Hope as a factor in maintaining environmental awareness and responsibility.
• Hope and its impact on adaptation to technological innovations.
• Reason and Religious Belief. An Introduction to The Philosophy of Religion’ by M. Peterson .
• The influence of hope on the formation and maintenance of healthy habits.
• Hope as a source of recovery in medical practices.
• Positive Self-Talk and Its Impact on Athletes .
• The role of hope in the creation of a positive working environment.
• The influence of hope on the development of professional reputation and success .
• How do we use hope for financial stability?
• Argumentative Essay: I Have a Good Life .
• The relationship between hope and the ability to creatively solve problems.
• What role does hope play in the social integration of migrants and refugees ?
• The use of hope as a driving force in the formation of psychological stability.
• Managing Self-Defeating Thoughts .
• How does hope drive effective leadership and teamwork?

Hopes and Dreams Essay: Topic Ideas

• The economy of dreams: hope in global capitalism and its critiques.
• How did COVID-19 impact Australians’ hopes and dreams?
• The impact of drug addiction on people’s ability to hope and dream.
• American Dream and its Drawbacks .
• Hopes and dreams: common and distinctive qualities.
• The contribution of hopes and dreams to a sense of purpose.
• Sociology of Religion: Purpose and Concept .
• The efficiency of music in conveying emotions related to hopes and dreams.
• How do different cultures perceive and prioritize hopes and dreams?
• I Have a Dream Speech by Martin Luther King .
• The role of hope and dream in classical literature.
• The psychological side of unfulfilled dreams and hopes.
• How do hopes and dreams change across various generations?
• The use of realism and idealism in pursuing hopes and dreams.
• How can hope and dreams help to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder ?
• The opportunities and obstacles teenagers face in pursuing their dreams and hopes.
• History: In Search of the American Dream .
• Childhood dreams and hopes and the development of adult identity.
• How do social media shape individuals’ hopes and dreams?

Ideas for an Essay on Youth Is Hope

• The pressure of high hopes for young people in the 21st century.
• How do role models aid in instilling hope in young individuals?
• Youth Involvement in Political Processes .
• Young people’s political activism as a source of public hope.
• The youth as a driving force of any country or culture.
• Impact of Information Technology on Youth Development .
• The role of youth in breaking stereotypes and fostering hope.
• Youth and international relations : hope for peace in the world.
• The potential of young political leaders to justify the hopes of society.
• Educational Program for Young Nurses .
• Youth and gender equality: hope for a future without discrimination.
• The role of young educators in creating a hopeful future for the next generation.
• Youth as the backbone of society and hope for a better life.
• Young Adulthood and Millennial Leadership .
• How does technological progress inspire youth to be more hopeful?
• Environmental activism of young people: creating hope for a sustainable future.
• Youth as hope for creating solidarity and respect in society .
• Is it justified to place high hopes on the youth?
• Youth and inclusiveness: hope for the future of equal opportunities.

Wondering how to structure your essay about hope? Leave it to us! Here is a perfect outline of a hope essay for students with examples!

Hope Essay Introduction

The introduction gives your reader a clear picture of what your essay will address. It should include some background information on your problem and proposed solution.

Take these steps to create a perfect introduction:

• Start with an attention-grabbing hook .
• Provide some background information.
• Narrow the scope of your discussion.
• Identify your position.
• Outline the framework of your essay.

Thesis Statement about Hope

A thesis statement is a short sentence that introduces your paper’s argument to the reader. Here’s how to write it:

• Collect the evidence to back up your argument.
• Think of the significance of the facts you have found.
• Formulate your stance on the issue in one sentence.
• Make adjustments as needed.

The thesis statement is usually the last sentence of your introduction. Look at an example of how it might look:

Although it is impossible to stop yourself from hoping, it can become problematic when that hope turns into a delusion.

Essay about Hope: Body Paragraphs

The essay’s body is where you thoroughly explore your point of view. Each body paragraph should have one main idea or argument supported by examples and evidence. The structure of your body paragraph should look the following way:

• Topic sentence.
• Supporting evidence.
• The link to the next paragraph.

Check out an example of a body paragraph containing all these elements:

[Topic sentence] Hope is one of the most significant and strong feelings that a person can experience. [Supporting evidence] It propels us ahead in life, gives us hope for the future, and generally helps us feel better about ourselves and our lives. Furthermore, hope enables us to continue living despite the difficulties we face in life. [Transition] Yet, there can be too much of a good thing, as overreliance on hope can leave one disappointed and defeated.

Essays on Hope: Conclusion

A conclusion brings together the essential concepts covered in the essay’s body. It includes 4 main components:

• Rephrased thesis statement.
• Summary of key arguments.
• The broader significance of the topic
• Prediction, recommendations, or call to action.

Here’s how a rephrased thesis might look:

To sum up, it is acceptable to spend some time in hope but not to live in it. Instead, people must live in reality, which is the only way to achieve results.

We hope that our creative and catchy hope titles for essays have been inspirational for you! Besides, you can use our free online topic generator for more ideas!

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Essay on Hope | Meaning, Purpose, Importance of Hope In Life

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Hope is the greatest source of survival and way towards achieving greater purpose and success in life. The following essay on hope focuses on meaning, purpose and importance of hope in our life. This short & long essay is quite helpful for children and students in their school exam preparation etc.

List of Topics

Essay on Hope | Meaning, Purpose, Importance of Hope in Life Essay For Students

Hope is an emotion that is characterized by strong desires for certain outcomes to happen.  Hope is an emotion that drives humans to achieve their goals. It provides the sense of purpose so they can work towards it. It is not only the desire for something good but determination to achieve something good even if you have to face many difficulties along the way.

This is also known as optimism, which enables you to set goals and achieve them.  Hope can vary from person to person. It can be intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. While intrinsic means that one gets hope by themselves, the latter means that others encourage someone to achieve their goal by providing external motivation such as money or fame

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Hope and optimism are often used in conjunction with each other, but they are not the same. Both involve having an optimistic mindset to achieve a certain goal, but hope is more of an emotion while optimism is more of a mindset. Hope involves wanting something to happen in the future with strong desire or determination.

It can drive people to achieve their goals and dreams, even through tough situations. Optimism, on the other hand, is a mindset that allows you to see positive outcomes in your situation rather than dwelling on the negative. Hope involves having a strong desire or determination to follow through with one’s goal or dream despite going through difficult times.

Importance of Hope in Life

Hope is a necessary in our lives because it gives us the desire to achieve something that we think will make us happy. It also provides the determination to complete tasks despite difficult conditions.

For instance, if you are sick and bedridden, without hope you wouldn’t want to do anything about your life; but with hope you would be motivated to get up and be productive. Hope also provides a greater reason to live life the way you want because it is a desire for things to happen rather than an acceptance of how things are going.

Many people would die if they lost hope in human decency and goodness, but those with hope would still try to make the world a better place no matter how small their efforts. Hope also helps people be sustained in their lives through tough times and this is important because humans need to grow stronger as they face various problems

Benefits of Hope in Life

There are several benefits that hope provides in life. Hope allows you to see the good around you and encourages many people to go after their goals, dreams, and aspirations.  Hope helps people have a greater desire to achieve something in life because they have a strong need to be happy. This gives them the internal motivation to do things that are necessary for their happiness.

Hope also makes people hopeful about their future which means they will be optimistic about what is to come. This encourages people to take risks and try out new things that may be necessary for their happiness.

People who are hopeless may decline to do anything because they think it would be useless. They can’t see any positive outcomes in their lives, which makes it hard to keep things up. Some people may also blame themselves for not doing anything to better their lives, which can cause depression or mental issues. Some even think that they don’t deserve to be happy or don’t have the right to pursue their dreams and aspirations, which can lead to many problems such as addictions and even death.

Hope is an important feeling to keep in life because it keeps us strong and ready for anything. Without hope, we would be victims to our lives and rather than looking forward to a better future we would be stuck in a rut.

Hope is a feeling that gives humans the desire to achieve their goals and dreams. It makes them see positive outcomes despite difficult circumstances, encourages people to take risks and follow their dreams, and keeps people strong and motivated.

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Hope is a necessity in everyone’s lives because it provides us with the strength to achieve our goals despite the challenges we face. It gives us the motivation to try harder and accomplish what we desire in life, which is something that everyone should have.

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Why Hope Matters

Hoping we can make things better is the secret to doing so..

Posted February 5, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

My first November as a professional writer wasn’t an easy one. My only client failed to pay his bill, I was receiving more rejections than assignments, my arthritis was flaring and my cat got $1,200-worth-of-vet-bills sick. I didn’t know how I was going to make my house payment and my stomach was upset. I stopped sleeping . But, I never stopped hoping. I believed that I could make this writing business work, and I set to work making that happen.

Hope Comes With the Possibility of Something Better

Hope implies that there is the possibility of a better future, according to the famed hope researcher C.R. Snyder. It shows up at the worst possible time when things are dire and difficult, but can keep us going during those hard moments. If during the difficulty, we can see the faint glimmer of something better, then hope “opens us up,” says Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology researcher. And turn us toward something better.

Hope is not a passive exercise in wishing, but an active approach to life, arising when there is something we want when we've got a clear goal in mind. And though it may be tough going, we’ll develop a plan to get us closer to where we want to go.

My goal was to be a full-time writer. My plan included sending out dozens of queries each week, writing every day, working with a mentor, taking classes. I taught to make ends meet. Did some public relations work, wrote at night. And, I was willing to take an early-morning job delivering papers if I needed. Anything to leave time to write.

Through each of these actions, I made a little progress. Experienced a little success. Made a little money, sold a short article, became a better writer. Those things kept me hoping, and that hope motivated me to keep working toward the ultimate goal.

Hope is motivating for me, even now, 23 years later. It’s not a delusional wishing things away, but a clarity of vision. Once you have your goal in mind, then you can get busy doing the things you need to get there. It helps me feel more empowered and less stressed .

And right now, that matters more than ever. Looking at the challenges we face, the hostility and adversity that seems to be seeping into the corners of our culture, the hope that we can make a positive difference in our families and communities can help us do it. Can help us move from the negative into something a little better.

Hope Helps Us Keep Going

Research indicates that hope can help us manage stress and anxiety and cope with adversity. It contributes to our well-being and happiness and motivates positive action. Hopeful people believe they can influence their goals, that their efforts can have a positive impact. They are also more likely to make healthy choices to eat better or exercise, or do the other things that will help them move toward what they are hoping for.

Then, other positive emotions such as courage and confidence ( self-efficacy ) and happiness emerge. They become our coping strategy, the emotions crucial in helping us survive. They allow us to take a wider view, become more creative in our approach and problem solving, and retain our optimism .

Hope isn’t delusional. It isn’t denial . It doesn't ignore the real challenges, details of the diagnosis, or dwindling money in the checking account. It is not woo-woo thinking.

It doesn’t ignore the trouble, or make excuses, or deny danger. It is not pretending. It is acknowledging the truth of the situation and working to find the best way to cope. It’s showing up and working through the hard stuff, believing that something better is possible. It’s resilient .

We can prime ourselves to hope, to move closer to optimism and action. Here’s how:

Seek inspiration and awe . Research by psychologist Dacher Keltner, PhD., shows that when we are so moved by something that we can hardly find the words to talk about it we are experiencing awe and that creates meaning, and positive feeling which contributes to a sense of hopefulness that can keep us moving forward. Awe reminds us of something bigger and vast. Causes us to slow down, think about what's important to us, and connect in a deeper way. I feel it every time I look at the ocean, and there is nothing more hopeful to me than watching the waves, roll in an out no matter what's going on around them.

Re-identify your goals. Maintaining a clear vision about what’s important and what we want to contribute and achieve also contributes to hope. When you are reminded of your big goals, the things that drive you to get up in the morning, you reconnect with your deeper values. Then, you’re more likely to persist because the process—the lifestyle that comes from living close to your values—helps you prevail despite obstacles.

Appreciate the setbacks and move through them. Hope is strengthened exponentially when you hit a setback and you persist despite it. Next time you run up against one, pay attention to what it offers you—a growth opportunity, a chance to learn something you need to know to accomplish your goals—then move through that challenge.

We all know tough times are going to come. Maybe you are in one now. Hope reminds us that we can continue and despite challenges, and pursue greater possibilities.

That’s a powerful feeling. One that keeps us moving instead of staying stuck in the despair.

It worked for me early on in my career —I did make the house payment, I’m still self-employed, still writing. Still hoping.

Polly Campbell is the host of the Polly Campbell, Simply Said podcast and the author of three books, including How to Live an Awesome Life and Imperfect Spirituality .

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• Introduction
• Hope is a critical emotion because it helps people to carry on during challenging times in life.
• Thesis Statement
• Hope is essential in peoples’ lives because it motivates them to keep going by encouraging them to work harder to achieve the desired goal despite the hardships; however, but it should be used with caution because it has its limitations.
• The Importance of Hope
• Hope encourages individuals in times of hardship to endure and carry on.
• In Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” she uses a metaphor by referring hope to a bird with feathers. Feathers are strong as they enable even the smallest birds to fly.
• The Disadvantage of Hope

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• Furthermore, hope may prevent a person from preparing adequately for possible adverse outcomes since one hopes for the best all the time.
• Even though hope is essential as it empowers people to remain strong during challenges, they should be cautious be hope may lead to disappointments.

Hope is one of the essential emotions that assist human beings in living better lives. Life is sometimes difficult, and one may face numerous challenges inhibiting him or her from achieving his or her goals hence requiring motivation from hope. According to Dickinson (2014), hope is what encourages an individual not to give up on one’s dreams and ambition no matter the challenges he or she is facing. Hope is essential in peoples’ lives because it motivates them to keep going by encouraging them to work harder to achieve th e desired goal despite the hardships, but it should be used wisely because it has its limitations.

Even though one may undergo undesirable challenges, hope inspire s that particular person to keep going and not giving up. Despite hardships, hope encourages people not to give up and believe in themselves (Rego, Sousa, Marques, & Cunha, 2014). Dickinson goes ahead to use a metaphor by stating that hope is like a bird that is attached permanently to humans’ souls in her poem “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers,” which motivates people not to give up. Dickinson refers hope to a bird with feathers. Feathers are strong becaus e they enable even the smallest birds to fly, which depicts hope as a powerful and useful emotion.

However, despite hope providing the individual with the will to carry on during difficult circumstances, sometimes hope may be false, which leads to disappointments. Since hope pertains to what has not yet happened, it may lead to disappointments because events may change drastically, making it impossible for what was hoped for to happen (Schrank, Amering, Hay, Weber, & Sibitz, 2014). Therefore, it is essential for people to limit their hopes sometimes to avoid being disappointed in the future.

Furthermore, hope can prevent individuals from preparing adequately for adverse outcomes. Hope is entirely built on the notion that everything will be fine, which may hinder one from preparing adequately for the potential negative outcome (Schrank et al., 2014). Sometimes having a flexible mindset that is ready for anything is better than having a rigid mindset that everything will turn out great.

In conclusion, hope is critical to peoples’ lives due to its ability to inspire and motivate them to continue working hard regardless of the challenges that face them; however, individuals should be cautious because hope has limitations. Among the limitations of hope is it may lead to disappointments primarily because it is based on always expecting the best. Therefore, despite hope motivating people during their hardest time, they should be cautious because it may lead to disappointments.

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I Hope You All Feel Terrible Now

How the internet—and Stephen Colbert—hounded Kate Middleton into revealing her diagnosis

Updated at 4:04 p.m ET on March 22, 2024

For many years, the most-complained-about cover of the British satirical magazine Private Eye was the one it published in the week after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. At the time, many people in Britain were loudly revolted by the tabloid newspapers that had hounded Diana after her divorce from Charles, and by the paparazzi whose quest for profitable pictures of the princess ended in an underpass in Paris.

Under the headline “Media to Blame,” the Eye cover carried a photograph of a crowd outside Buckingham Palace, with three speech bubbles. The first was: “The papers are a disgrace.” The next two said: “Yeah, I couldn’t get one anywhere” and “Borrow mine, it’s got a picture of the car.” People were furious. Sacks of angry, defensive mail arrived for days afterward, and several outlets withdrew the magazine from sale. (I am an Eye contributor, and these events have passed into office legend.) But with the benefit of hindsight, the implication was accurate: Intruding on the private lives of the royals is close to a British tradition. We Britons might have the occasional fit of remorse, but that doesn’t stop us. And now, because of the internet, everyone else can join in too.

Read: Just asking questions about Kate Middleton

That cover instantly sprang to mind when, earlier today, the current Princess of Wales announced that she has cancer. In a video recorded on Wednesday in Windsor, the former Kate Middleton outlined her diagnosis in order to put an end to weeks of speculation, largely incubated online but amplified and echoed by mainstream media outlets, about the state of her health and marriage.

Kate has effectively been bullied into this statement, because the alternative—a wildfire of gossip and conspiracy theories—was worse. So please, let’s not immediately switch into maudlin recriminations about how this happened. It happened because people felt they had the right to know Kate’s private medical information. The culprits may include three staff members at the London hospital that treated her, who have been accused of accessing her medical records, perhaps driven by the same curiosity that has lit up my WhatsApp inbox for weeks. Everyone hates the tabloid papers, until they become them.

In her statement, Kate said that after her abdominal surgery earlier in the year, which the press was told at the time was “planned”—a word designed to minimize its seriousness—later tests revealed an unspecified cancer. She is now undergoing “preventative chemotherapy,” but has not revealed the progression of the disease, or her exact prognosis. “I am well,” she said, promising that she is getting stronger every day. “I hope you will understand that as a family, we now need some time, space and privacy while I complete my treatment.”

This news will surely make many people feel bad. The massive online guessing game about the reasons for Kate’s invisibility seems far less fun now. Stephen Colbert’s “spilling the tea” monologue , which declared open season on the princess’s marriage, should probably be quietly interred somewhere. The sad simplicity of today’s statement, filmed on a bench with Kate in casual jeans and a striped sweater, certainly gave me pause. She mentioned the difficulty of having to “process” the news, as well as explaining her condition to her three young children in terms they could understand. The reference to the importance of “having William by my side” was pointed, given how much of the speculation has gleefully dwelt on the possibility that she was leaving him or vice versa.

Read: The eternal scrutiny of Kate Middleton

However, the statement also reveals that the online commentators who suggested that the royal household was keeping something from the public weren’t entirely wrong. Kate’s condition was described as noncancerous when her break from public life was announced in late January . The updated diagnosis appears to have been delivered in February, around the time her husband, Prince William, abruptly pulled out of speaking at a memorial service for the former king of Greece. Today’s statement represents a failure of Kensington Palace to control the narrative: first, by publishing a photograph of Kate and her children that was so obviously edited that photo agencies retracted it, and second, by giving its implicit permission for the publication of a grainy video of the couple shopping in Windsor over the weekend. Neither of those decisions quenched the inferno raging online—in fact, they fed it.

Some will say that Kate has finally done what she should have done much earlier: directly address the rumors in an official video, rather than drip-feed images that raised more questions than they answered. King Charles III has taken a different approach to his own (also unspecified) cancer, allowing footage to be filmed of him working from home. But then again, Kate has cancer at 42, is having chemo, and has three young children. Do you really have it in you to grade her media strategy and find it wanting?

Ironically, Britain’s tabloid papers have shown remarkable restraint; as I wrote earlier this month , they declined to publish the first paparazzi pictures of Kate taken after her withdrawal from public life. They have weighted their decisions toward respect and dignity—more so than the Meghan stans, royal tea-spillers, and KateGate theorists, who have generated such an unstoppable wave of interest in this story that its final destination was a woman with cancer being forced to reveal her diagnosis. If you ever wanted proof that the “mainstream media” are less powerful than ever before, this video of Kate Middleton sitting on a bench is it.

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Guest Essay

I Hope to Repeal an Arcane Law That Could Be Misused to Ban Abortion Nationwide

By Tina Smith

Ms. Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

A long discredited, arcane 150-year-old law is back in the news in 2024, and that should terrify anyone who supports reproductive freedom. Last week at the Supreme Court, the Comstock Act of 1873 was referenced on three separate occasions during oral arguments in a case dealing with access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in medication abortions.

Anti-abortion activists like to bring up the Comstock Act because one of its clauses prohibits sending through the mail “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” that could possibly lead to an abortion. Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t take the bait, a newly re-elected President Trump could order his Department of Justice to start interpreting that line to mean that it is illegal to mail mifepristone — a safe, effective, Food and Drug Administration-approved drug — to doctors and pharmacies, as well as to patients directly. The same could go for medical supplies that are used in performing surgical abortions. That could effectively make abortion impossible to access even in places like Minnesota, which has affirmatively protected a woman’s right to choose by passing reproductive freedom laws.

In response, I’m prepared to fight back — including by introducing legislation to take away the Comstock Act as a tool to limit reproductive freedom.

Let me take a step back and explain how ridiculous it is that we’re even talking about this legislative relic today. The Comstock Act hasn’t been broadly enforced since the 1930s. The Biden administration considers it utterly irrelevant. Many legal experts consider it dead letter law. And once you know its back story, it becomes clear why no one has paid much attention to it in nearly a century.

Back in the 1860s, a former Civil War soldier from rural Connecticut named Anthony Comstock moved to New York City for work. He was shocked and appalled by what he found. Advertisements for contraception! Open discussions of sexual health! It all struck Comstock as terribly lewd and anti-Christian.

So he made it his mission to clean up society, creating the loftily named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and gathering evidence for police raids on places that distributed material he thought was obscene or promoted indecent living. In the early 1870s he took his crusade to Washington, lobbying for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock’s criteria for being “obscene,” “lewd” or just plain “filthy.” Morality, as determined by Comstock, would be the law of the land, and Comstock himself would be its enforcer, appointed by Congress as a special agent of the post office.

In a fit of Victorian puritanism, Congress passed the Comstock Act into law. But it quickly became apparent that Comstock’s criteria were unworkably vague. In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories.

The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that’s why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history.

But conservative activists recently revived it from obscurity as part of their playbook for a potential second Trump term: The 887-page plan nicknamed Project 2025 being promoted by groups like the Heritage Foundation explicitly calls for a newly elected second-term President Trump to use this zombie law to severely ratchet back abortion access in America without congressional action.

Legislation to repeal Comstock could take many forms, and we need to do it the right way. That’s why I’ve begun reaching out to my colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate to build support and see what legislation to repeal the Comstock Act might look like. Anti-abortion extremists will continue to exploit any avenue they can find to get the national ban they champion, and I want to make sure my bill shuts down every one of those avenues. Once the Supreme Court has had its say (and many legal analysts speculate that the mifepristone case heard last week should be thrown out on procedural grounds, and may well be), I’ll be ready to have mine.

Here’s the bottom line: We can’t let anyone — not the Supreme Court, not Donald Trump and certainly not a random busybody from the 19th century — take away Americans’ right to access medication abortion. We must protect the ability of doctors, pharmacies and patients to receive in the mail the supplies they need to exercise their right to reproductive care.

As the only former Planned Parenthood executive serving in the Senate, I feel I have a special responsibility to protect not just abortion rights but also abortion access.

Very few Republicans will admit to wanting to see a total, no-exceptions ban on abortion in all 50 states, but the Comstock Act could allow them to achieve that in effect, if not in so many words.

Americans deserve better. The Constitution demands better. And common sense dictates that we stop this outrageous backdoor ploy to eliminate abortion access in its tracks.

Tina Smith is a Democratic senator from Minnesota and a former Planned Parenthood executive.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Regions Riding Forward® Scholarship Contest

Their Story. Your Voice.

Your voice is your own. But it's also been impacted by others. Who, we wonder, has inspired you? Let us know by entering the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest. 

You could win an $8,000 college scholarship

For the opportunity to win an $8,000 scholarship, submit a video or written essay about an individual you know personally (who lives in your community) who has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

The details

The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest consists of four (4) separate Quarterly Contests - one for each calendar quarter of 2024. Regions is awarding four $8,000 scholarships through each Quarterly Contest.

Each Quarterly Contest has its own separate entry period, as provided in the chart below.

The entry deadline for each Quarterly Contest is 11:59:59 PM Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date (set forth in the chart above).

No purchase or banking relationship required.

Regions believes in supporting the students whose passion and actions every day will continue to make stories worth sharing. That’s why we have awarded over $1 million in total scholarships to high school and college students.

How to enter, 1. complete an online quarterly contest application.

Enter the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest by completing a Quarterly Contest application.  The second Quarterly Contest runs from April 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024. Complete and save all requested information. 

2. Prepare your Written Essay or Video Essay

For each Quarterly Contest, the topic of your Written Essay or Video Essay (your “Essay Topic”) must be an individual you know personally, who lives in your community. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must address how the individual you have selected as your Essay Topic has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

Written Essay and Video Essay submissions must meet all of the requirements described in the contest Official Rules. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must be (i) in English, (ii) your own original work, created solely by you (and without the use of any means of artificial intelligence (“AI”)), and (iii) the exclusive property of you alone.

Written Essays must be 500 words or less. You can write your Written Essay directly in the application, or you can copy and paste it into the appropriate area in the application form.

Video Essay submissions must be directly uploaded to the contest application site. Video Essays must be no more than 3 minutes in length and no larger than 1 GB. Only the following file formats are accepted: MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, and WMV. Video Essays must not contain music of any kind nor display any illegal, explicit, or inappropriate material, and Video Essays must not be password protected or require a log-in/sign-in to view. You must upload your Video Essay to the application, and you may not submit your Video Essay in DVD or other physical form. (Video Essays submitted via mail will not be reviewed or returned.)

Tips to Record Quality Videos on a Smartphone:

• Don’t shoot vertical video. Computer monitors have landscape-oriented displays, so shoot your video horizontally.
• Use a tripod. Even small movements can make a big difference when editing.
• Don’t use zoom. If you need to get a close shot of the subject, move closer as zooming can cause pixilation.
• Use natural lighting. Smartphone lighting can wash out your video.

3. Review and submit your Quarterly Contest application

Review your information on your Quarterly Application (and check the spelling of a Written Essay) and submit your entry by 11:59:59 p.m. Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date. The second Quarterly Contest period end date is June 30, 2024.

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Winning entries are selected by an independent panel of judges who are not affiliated with Regions. If your entry is selected as a Quarterly Contest winner, you will need to respond to ISTS with the required information.

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• An “accredited college” is defined as a nonprofit, two- or four-year college or university located within one of the fifty (50) United States or the District of Columbia.

To be eligible to enter this contest and to win an award in a Quarterly Contest, at the time of entry, you must:

• Be a legal U.S. resident of one of the Eligible States.
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• Have at least one (1) year (or at least 18 semester hours) remaining before college graduation.
• If you are not yet in college, begin your freshman year of college no later than the start of the 2025 – 2026 college academic school year.
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That Viral Essay Wasn’t About Age Gaps. It Was About Marrying Rich.

But both tactics are flawed if you want to have any hope of becoming yourself..

Women are wisest, a viral essay in New York magazine’s the Cut argues , to maximize their most valuable cultural assets— youth and beauty—and marry older men when they’re still very young. Doing so, 27-year-old writer Grazie Sophia Christie writes, opens up a life of ease, and gets women off of a male-defined timeline that has our professional and reproductive lives crashing irreconcilably into each other. Sure, she says, there are concessions, like one’s freedom and entire independent identity. But those are small gives in comparison to a life in which a person has no adult responsibilities, including the responsibility to become oneself.

This is all framed as rational, perhaps even feminist advice, a way for women to quit playing by men’s rules and to reject exploitative capitalist demands—a choice the writer argues is the most obviously intelligent one. That other Harvard undergraduates did not busy themselves trying to attract wealthy or soon-to-be-wealthy men seems to flummox her (taking her “high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out” to the Harvard Business School library, “I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence”). But it’s nothing more than a recycling of some of the oldest advice around: For women to mold themselves around more-powerful men, to never grow into independent adults, and to find happiness in a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, submission, and dependence. These are odd choices for an aspiring writer (one wonders what, exactly, a girl who never wants to grow up and has no idea who she is beyond what a man has made her into could possibly have to write about). And it’s bad advice for most human beings, at least if what most human beings seek are meaningful and happy lives.

But this is not an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying older men. It is an essay about the benefits of younger women marrying rich men. Most of the purported upsides—a paid-for apartment, paid-for vacations, lives split between Miami and London—are less about her husband’s age than his wealth. Every 20-year-old in the country could decide to marry a thirtysomething and she wouldn’t suddenly be gifted an eternal vacation.

Which is part of what makes the framing of this as an age-gap essay both strange and revealing. The benefits the writer derives from her relationship come from her partner’s money. But the things she gives up are the result of both their profound financial inequality and her relative youth. Compared to her and her peers, she writes, her husband “struck me instead as so finished, formed.” By contrast, “At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self.” The idea of having to take responsibility for her own life was profoundly unappealing, as “adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations.” Tying herself to an older man gave her an out, a way to skip the work of becoming an adult by allowing a father-husband to mold her to his desires. “My husband isn’t my partner,” she writes. “He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did.”

These, by the way, are the things she says are benefits of marrying older.

The downsides are many, including a basic inability to express a full range of human emotion (“I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that constrains the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him”) and an understanding that she owes back, in some other form, what he materially provides (the most revealing line in the essay may be when she claims that “when someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them”). It is clear that part of what she has paid in exchange for a paid-for life is a total lack of any sense of self, and a tacit agreement not to pursue one. “If he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive,” she writes, “but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials.”

Reading Christie’s essay, I thought of another one: Joan Didion’s on self-respect , in which Didion argues that “character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” If we lack self-respect, “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.” Self-respect may not make life effortless and easy. But it means that whenever “we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves,” at least we can fall asleep.

It can feel catty to publicly criticize another woman’s romantic choices, and doing so inevitably opens one up to accusations of jealousy or pettiness. But the stories we tell about marriage, love, partnership, and gender matter, especially when they’re told in major culture-shaping magazines. And it’s equally as condescending to say that women’s choices are off-limits for critique, especially when those choices are shared as universal advice, and especially when they neatly dovetail with resurgent conservative efforts to make women’s lives smaller and less independent. “Marry rich” is, as labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards put it in Bloomberg, essentially the Republican plan for mothers. The model of marriage as a hierarchy with a breadwinning man on top and a younger, dependent, submissive woman meeting his needs and those of their children is not exactly a fresh or groundbreaking ideal. It’s a model that kept women trapped and miserable for centuries.

It’s also one that profoundly stunted women’s intellectual and personal growth. In her essay for the Cut, Christie seems to believe that a life of ease will abet a life freed up for creative endeavors, and happiness. But there’s little evidence that having material abundance and little adversity actually makes people happy, let alone more creatively generativ e . Having one’s basic material needs met does seem to be a prerequisite for happiness. But a meaningful life requires some sense of self, an ability to look outward rather than inward, and the intellectual and experiential layers that come with facing hardship and surmounting it.

A good and happy life is not a life in which all is easy. A good and happy life (and here I am borrowing from centuries of philosophers and scholars) is one characterized by the pursuit of meaning and knowledge, by deep connections with and service to other people (and not just to your husband and children), and by the kind of rich self-knowledge and satisfaction that comes from owning one’s choices, taking responsibility for one’s life, and doing the difficult and endless work of growing into a fully-formed person—and then evolving again. Handing everything about one’s life over to an authority figure, from the big decisions to the minute details, may seem like a path to ease for those who cannot stomach the obligations and opportunities of their own freedom. It’s really an intellectual and emotional dead end.

And what kind of man seeks out a marriage like this, in which his only job is to provide, but very much is owed? What kind of man desires, as the writer cast herself, a raw lump of clay to be molded to simply fill in whatever cracks in his life needed filling? And if the transaction is money and guidance in exchange for youth, beauty, and pliability, what happens when the young, beautiful, and pliable party inevitably ages and perhaps feels her backbone begin to harden? What happens if she has children?

The thing about using youth and beauty as a currency is that those assets depreciate pretty rapidly. There is a nearly endless supply of young and beautiful women, with more added each year. There are smaller numbers of wealthy older men, and the pool winnows down even further if one presumes, as Christie does, that many of these men want to date and marry compliant twentysomethings. If youth and beauty are what you’re exchanging for a man’s resources, you’d better make sure there’s something else there—like the basic ability to provide for yourself, or at the very least a sense of self—to back that exchange up.

It is hard to be an adult woman; it’s hard to be an adult, period. And many women in our era of unfinished feminism no doubt find plenty to envy about a life in which they don’t have to work tirelessly to barely make ends meet, don’t have to manage the needs of both children and man-children, could simply be taken care of for once. This may also explain some of the social media fascination with Trad Wives and stay-at-home girlfriends (some of that fascination is also, I suspect, simply a sexual submission fetish , but that’s another column). Fantasies of leisure reflect a real need for it, and American women would be far better off—happier, freer—if time and resources were not so often so constrained, and doled out so inequitably.

But the way out is not actually found in submission, and certainly not in electing to be carried by a man who could choose to drop you at any time. That’s not a life of ease. It’s a life of perpetual insecurity, knowing your spouse believes your value is decreasing by the day while his—an actual dollar figure—rises. A life in which one simply allows another adult to do all the deciding for them is a stunted life, one of profound smallness—even if the vacations are nice.

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