If you feel like everything is on fire, well, you’re not alone. The world is living through what feels like a rolling existential crisis. Climate change is speeding up, global conflicts are building, and political divides have ripped apart families and friends.

The U.S. fell to its lowest ranking ever (24th) on the 2025 World Happiness Report. According to a national poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, more than half of Americans under 30 report no sense of belonging and feeling “depressed, down, or hopeless.”

We’re all doomscrolling – and taking the doom to heart. And when someone tells you to “just stay positive,” it can feel like being handed a juice box after a house fire. How are we supposed to stay hopeful? Is that even a reasonable goal anymore? A new study from the University of Missouri offers a timely reminder: Hope isn’t just a luxury – it supports our sense of meaning and direction. Researchers found that people who report higher levels of hope are significantly more likely to find their lives meaningful.

Psychologists, researchers, and philosophers believe hope is still possible, but not in the ways we might expect. It isn’t about ignoring reality or forcing ourselves to stay positive. It’s about something deeper and more durable. It’s about showing up for your own life, even when it’s messy. It’s about making space for grief and humor and gratitude and allowing it all to live side by side.  Robin Stern, PhD, co-founder of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, says hope starts not with forced optimism but with giving yourself permission to feel terrible. “It grows out of emotional honesty,” she explains. When we stop judging our sadness or grief and simply sit with it, we create “the conditions for hope to take root, not as an instant fix, but as a quiet return to possibility.”

This is the heart of what Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl dubbed “tragic optimism.” Frankl introduced the concept in his 1983 lecture at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy, describing it as “being optimistic in spite of the ‘tragic triad’ ” – three unavoidable parts of human existence: pain, guilt, and death.