How to Shift From Cynicism to Grounded Hope

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.

From Doomscrolling to Hopeful Skepticism

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 up and return him to his hopeful self with what he calls “hopeful skepticism.” In his book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Zaki defines hope as “the belief that a better future is possible through our actions.” Bingo. If you don’t question your default perspective, Zaki notes, you’re not being critically minded.

Here’s my "tracking wonder" framing: When we get stuck in our default perspective of humanity, we can either be gullible (unchecked optimism) or cynical (unchecked constricted perspective). This is where tracking wonder comes into play—the steps we take to question, alter, and expand that perspective. Tracking wonder is the practice of catching ourselves in reductive assumptions—then widening our lens on what’s real, possible, and human, especially about our human species and the possibilities for a better future.

How Could Everyone Else but Me Be Cold?

At Stanford, Zaki was witnessing cynicism firsthand among students. He and his lab partners surveyed thousands of students about how much they cared about their peers, their desire to meet students they didn’t know, and how much they wanted to help out their peers.

The surveys showed a big contradiction between self-perception and other-perception. On one hand, most students desired warm relationships and expressed care for others. Ninety-five percent said they enjoyed helping others when they were down. High empathy! On the other hand, they generally viewed their peers as calloused and calculating.

So Zaki’s lab started a freshman program. They publicly shared data in dorms about their peers’ desires to help and connect with each other, and they held conversations about empathy. The results were that students felt more comfortable with each other and started connecting in more genuine ways.

Look at this process of tracking hope:

1. Zaki saw a problem and pain point that he cared about.
2. His lab conducted studies and experimented by presenting new data that challenged people’s unchecked, naive assumptions about one another.
3. A fresh, expansive perspective on humanity shifts our outlook.
4. Wisely facilitated action and conversations fostered a different reality among students.
5. Both Zaki and the students live with more hope.

Similar dynamics can happen among your faculty members, coworkers, team members, group members, clients, students, and customers—the people you care about and elevate. In such cases, it takes leaders—or a third-party facilitator—to foster this reality shift.

This is tracking wonder in action.

Reasons to Be Hopeful

Pessimism Essential Reads

How to Be Less Miserable, End Negativity, and Feel Joy

Why Cynicism Feels Smart—But Can Sabotage Your Success

Zaki’s data also points to reasons not to be cynical as a rule:

• Cynicism correlates with poorer health and shorter lifespan.
• Cynicism reduces cooperation, creativity, and social connection.
• Gallup shows that 56 percent of employees see hope as the most essential trait in a leader.

But here’s the real reason to be hopeful: You become an active part of a better future, no matter how big or small your actions.

People who track hope and foster a hopeful skepticism are also the ones who are more likely to act in the world and at work for positive change.

Leading and Creating With a New View of Hope

In the past few years, as I spoke to more audiences, I came to realize this: The more change-makers understand what hope is and is not, the more powerfully we can effect grounded, positive change in this beautiful world.

This new view of grounded hope surfaced as research for the book Tracking Wonder led me to dive deeply into the literature of hope. Hope, as wonder’s rainbow facet, is not wishful thinking. It’s a proactive mindset that includes optimism + agency + action in the face of an uncertain future. It sets you in action toward a better future and boosts your mood on the journey itself.

Whether you, your customers, or the world you and I live in is going through a hard time, tracking hope helps.

Your Window of Possibility

• Identify the cynical story: What’s a problem or pain point or frustration you’ve identified that could make you cynical? Problem identification is often the starting place for innovation, above-the-line leadership, and creative living.

• Replace assumptions with curiosity: Rather than getting cynical, how, instead, could you get curious about this problem? Curiosity breaks cynicism’s closed loop.

• Take a small action toward possibility: What’s one simple experiment you could take—a new habit, a new action, a light-lifting project—to track a response to the problem you identified? One conversation or helpful action can shift reality.

Fostering and tracking hope is not naive. Instead, hope is evidence-informed and action-oriented—and it is contagious. We can influence the culture around us by modeling the behavior of grounded possibility.

So much is possible.