The Three Components of Hope

 

The Three Components of Hope

Dr. Charles R. Snyder, a pioneer in hope research and author of The Psychology of Hope, wrote that hope has three components: goals, agency, and pathways. We need a goal that transcends us, something worth living for. We need agency, the ability to shape our lives to accomplish our goals. And we need pathways, routes or plans by which to do so.

We can use the pandemic to illustrate his theory. The coronavirus vaccines have been giving hope to the world: we have a goal of surviving the virus, an ability to do so through the vaccines, and a pathway to receive them. Then came the announcement of an omicron variant that might evade vaccines and make the pandemic start over, and our hopes have fallen.

Now we are hearing the possibility that omicron could be more infectious but less serious than delta and other variants. If so, many people could get it, survive it, build immunities to it, and turn the pandemic into an "endemic"—something we can live with, like the flu. I am not saying this will turn out to be true, merely that some scientists believe it could be one outcome.

How does this possibility make you feel? It makes you feel hope. We have the same goal of surviving the virus, but now we have the agency and pathways to do so.