Something remarkable is happening beneath the headlines of despair: people are getting more hopeful.
Gallup’s new Life Evaluation Index, a measure of how people rate their present and future lives, shows that global well-being is climbing. In 2024, one in three adults around the world described their lives as “thriving,” the highest level in more than a decade. At the same time, the share of people who say they are “suffering” dropped to a record low of 7 percent. It’s a small statistical note, but an enormous cultural one. For the first time in years, optimism isn’t just surviving — it’s expanding.
The Gallup index doesn’t ask about GDP or unemployment rates. It asks people to rate their lives on a ladder from zero to 10: where they stand now and where they expect to be in five years. If they rate their present life at seven or higher and their future at eight or higher, they’re considered “thriving.” In 2024, that share hit 33 percent across 142 countries — a median figure that represents steady progress since before the pandemic. Even when population-weighted for countries like India and China, global thriving still sits at 28 percent, up significantly from a decade ago.
This isn’t a blip. Both present and future life ratings are trending upward. The median score for people’s current life sits at 5.9 out of 10 — stable but historically high — while their expectation for the next five years has reached 7.2. The world, it seems, believes the future will be better than the past.
The data’s most surprising twist is where hope is rising. While well-being has fallen slightly in North America, Western Europe and Australia — places once synonymous with prosperity — it’s rising almost everywhere else. Latin America, Eastern Europe and large parts of Asia are seeing steady gains in self-reported life satisfaction. Countries once defined by post-communist instability, like Serbia, Lithuania and Kosovo, now lead some of the biggest jumps in thriving scores. The same trend holds across East and Southeast Asia and in the Middle East, where people report modest but measurable improvements in well-being. Switzerland, interestingly, stands alone in the opposite direction — it’s the only country in the world where thriving dropped more than 20 points over the past decade.
The data tells a quiet story of inversion: as some of the richest nations grow disillusioned, emerging regions are discovering new reasons to believe in tomorrow. And that raises an important question — what’s fueling this sense of forward motion?
Some scholars suggest the difference lies in what societies choose to value. Harvard professor Tyler VanderWeele, who co-leads the Global Flourishing Study, believes the decline in well-being among wealthier nations might come down to misplaced priorities.
“I tend to think you end up getting what you value most,” he told The New York Times. “When a society is oriented toward economic gain, you will be moderately successful, but not if it’s done at the expense of meaning and community.”
That shift in values could explain why countries with fewer material advantages are seeing greater improvements in life satisfaction. Many of the regions experiencing rising well-being — Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America — still hold tightly to communal and spiritual traditions that anchor people to one another. As economic conditions improve, those shared values seem to deepen rather than erode, creating a foundation for hope that money alone can’t replicate.
Dan Witters, research director of Gallup’s Well-Being Index, believes the same dynamic is at play on a personal level.
“People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community,” he told The New York Times. “They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.”
That sense of belonging — and of meaning — may be what distinguishes the hopeful from the hopeless. Gallup found that 81 percent of people worldwide say they are satisfied with their personal freedoms, a steady climb that cuts across borders and political systems. Seventy-five percent say their country is a good place for children to grow up, the highest share ever recorded. Nearly half expect their living standards to improve, and 42 percent believe their local economies are getting better.
These numbers suggest something deeper than material progress. They show a growing sense of agency — people believing they can shape their own future, not just survive it. Freedom, opportunity, faith in the next generation: these are the ingredients of hope.
Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki thinks this rising sense of hope matters more than ever.
“It’s important to distinguish between optimism and hope,” he said to RELEVANT. “Optimism is the belief that the future will turn out well. Hope is the belief that it could turn out well — and that what we do matters in making that happen.”
Zaki’s research on what he calls “hopeful skepticism” offers a framework for understanding why this shift is so significant.
Hope, unlike optimism, doesn’t require certainty. It thrives on agency.
“Hopeful people see a possible better future and then take steps to bridge the gap,” he explained. “They’re magnetized toward the future they want via their actions, not just by waiting around.”
Optimism can be fragile. When things don’t go as expected, it can easily collapse into cynicism.
“If I have strong expectations that everything will be great and then reality is less well, then I might even become cynical in the future,” Zaki said.
Hope, on the other hand, is durable precisely because it makes room for disappointment. It acknowledges that progress is slow, messy and uncertain — and insists on showing up anyway.
That’s why the global rise in hope, modest as it may seem, carries so much weight. It’s not the naïve conviction that everything will be fine. It’s a collective reminder that what people do still matters — that our efforts, however small, can build a better world. Cynicism, by contrast, isolates.
“Cynicism is the assumption that people in general are selfish, greedy and dishonest,” Zaki said. “Skepticism is instead not having any assumption about what people are like, but rather looking for evidence.” When we assume the worst, we stop participating in solutions. Hopeful skepticism, he argues, asks for evidence — and often finds surprising signs of goodness.
The Gallup data shows that, on some level, humanity is already learning this lesson. Even in an age of climate disasters, war and economic instability, people are choosing to believe that the future is still worth investing in. Maybe they’re not sure it will turn out well, but they’re betting that it could.
That’s not wishful thinking — it’s courage. The kind that drives people to rebuild cities after earthquakes, start families amid uncertainty and keep planting trees they may never sit beneath. The kind of faith that says the story isn’t over yet.
The world’s optimism may be shifting south and east, but its message is universal. Progress is possible. Resilience is renewable. And in a time when despair is easy to find, the willingness to hope might be the most radical act of all.
