"Never lose infinite hope..."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr said, "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."  Hope is an incredibly powerful thing.  Desmond Tutu said that "hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness."  It's what keeps us going on.  We are resilient, as long as we have hope.  The Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "To live without hope is to cease to live."

A study came out a few years ago linking a decrease in the average life expectancy of Americans due to what the investigators called "deaths of despair".  The dramatic increase in mortality from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism can be traced indirectly to a loss of hope.  Studies have linked greater hope with better physical and mental health outcomes, health-related behaviors, emotional well-being, social relationships, and overall life satisfaction!  

Dr. Carley Riley, one of my former colleagues at Cincinnati Children's recently published a very interesting study ("Trends and Variation in the Gap Between Current and Anticipated Life Satisfaction in the United States, 2008-2020") that is highly pertinent to this discussion.  Riley and her team leveraged a large set of data collected almost daily beginning in 2008, the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, to develop a measure of hope among individuals living in the United States.  The database included over 2.7 million respondents from 2008 to 2020, representing approximately 3/4 of the entire U.S. population.  Two specific questions were utilized:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top.  The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.  (1) On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (2) On which step do you think you will stand about 5 years from now?

The first question measured current life satisfaction (CLS), while the second question measured anticipated life satisfaction (ALS).  A population's hope was therefore defined as the mean ALS minus the mean CLS (i.e., anticipated life satisfaction higher than current life satisfaction).  From 2008 through 2019 (i.e. right before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic), overall hope across the U.S. remained largely unchanged.  Even though CLS significantly decreased from 2019 to 2020 (likely due to the pandemic), ALS remained unchanged.  In other words, the individuals responding to the survey by and large maintained a sense of hope for the future, even in spite of everything going on in the world at that time.

When the investigators drilled down further at county-level data (survey responses were geographically linked to zip codes), they found that the difference between ALS and CLS declined in 1 out of every 7 counties (and both declined in 1 out of 11 counties) even before the pandemic.  So, the sense of hope and optimism for the future was not uniform across the country.  These results are consistent with other studies that show that hopelessness clusters at the neighborhood level.

It's encouraging that Americans overall remain optimistic about the future, at least through 2020.  A lot of things have happened since the end of 2020 though, so it will be interesting to see whether this trend holds in future surveys.  Moreover, as Dr. Riley and her team suggest, this rather interesting study doesn't necessarily tell us how to address the loss of hope that has occurred in certain areas of the country that seem particularly prone to these "deaths of despair."