When in my 20s, I equated hope with “sunny-side-of-the-street” wishful thinking—what we now call “toxic positivity.” I was wrong.

I live, work, and lead these days with a new kind of grounded hope.

Many thoughtful, intelligent people are sliding toward cynicism. But recent research shows something surprising about the nature of hope in the face of cynicism. I want to share research conducted on cynical college students—and how that research shifted the outlook even of the chief researcher. This research shows us that we can put into practice the act of tracking hope for ourselves and the people we care about.

By day, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki studied and promoted human empathy and other good qualities in human beings. But at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was doomscrolling. A bit “cut off” with a skewed sense of the full spectrum of reality and of humanity, he says he started letting his distrustful, cynical self take over his thinking.

On a related note, regular news consumption does influence people’s negative outlook toward humanity, according to a meta-study entitled, “Is the news making us unhappy?”

It took a friend dying from cancer to wake Zaki........

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