The whole point of hope is that it doesn't have a plausible reason. That's what makes it hope and not knowledge. If you already know things will get better, you do not need to hope they will, you can just wait for it to happen.
> The whole point of hope is that it doesn't have a plausible reason. That's what makes it hope and not knowledge.
This seems a bit coarse. Working hard to move from the lower class to solidly middle class is not guaranteed, so the pursuit of that is based on both hope and knowledge. However, if the statistical likelihood of this move begins decreasing, and simultaneously the rates of people moving in the opposite direction is also rising, one could argue that a natural response would be for "hope" levels to decrease.
By this reasoning, someone in a historically war-torn country (there are a few, you can imagine it's any one of them) should not hope for a peaceful time at some point. I think this is a good example of a case where hope does indeed work, even though the thing you hope for is statistically unlikely.
More accurately, by this reasoning, someone in a war torn country might be expected to have lower hope levels than someone in that same country before it became war torn. For some people, hope is always possible, but when things are going backwards, a lot of people have trouble maintaining hope.
