HERE’s an interesting paradox. Despite the cost-of-living crisis, bloody conflicts around the world, the increased likelihood of nuclear war, and unchecked climate change, most people think that the year ahead will be better than last year.

This unlikely revelation can be found in the Ipsos Predictions Survey 2025, which polls expectations and predictions in 33 countries for the year to come. It reveals that only 65 per cent of people polled judged 2024 “a bad year for my country” — the lowest figure since 2019. A staggering 71 per cent globally believe 2025 will be better than 2024, even though two-thirds of them expect prices, taxes, and unemployment to rise, and 80 per cent expect rising global temperatures with more extreme weather events. The number fearing nuclear conflict has risen to 49 per cent.

The world’s religions might once have offered a convincing explanation for such cognitive dissonance. Notions of divine providence, eschatological hope, redemptive suffering, repairing the world, or cyclical renewal might once have bridged the gap for Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists in their different ways. But all that does not, I suspect, cut much mustard in the secular world.

Some explanation lies in regional biases. Countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and China — with young populations, emerging opportunities, and strong economic growth — contain the most optimists. European nations — with ageing populations, slow economic growth, and a heightened awareness of persistent global uncertainties — have the fewest. In China, 77 per cent think that AI technology will create new jobs; in Japan, 65 per cent predict that it will bring job losses.

Yet, everywhere people are more upbeat about their personal lives than about their national context. Psychologists put this down to “optimism bias” — and the tendency, when looking to the future, to overlook potential risks or negativities and focus instead on favourable outcomes. We do this irrespective of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age. It is why smokers, bungee jumpers, and gamblers think that it will be others who will be the unlucky ones.

Added to that is a general faith in human ingenuity and technological progress. The Covid pandemic seemed apocalyptic, but it was neutralised with brilliant vaccines. Governments will similarly find technological solutions to climate change. Or so believe 84 per cent of people in China, in contrast to only 32 per cent globally who believe that.

There seems a wilful blindness about much of this optimism. How else can the West turn away from the world’s worst famine in Sudan or acquiesce in Israel’s reckless “collateral” killing of children, women, doctors, and journalists in Gaza. We support Ukraine against Russia, but only so long as we ourselves do not have to fight — and we will probably breathe a sigh of relief when Donald Trump does some dodgy deal with Vladimir Putin.

What all this underscores is the importance of distinguishing theologically between optimism and hope in 2025. Optimism is a fleeting human-centric expectation that life will trend toward the positive. Hope, in contrast, requires a trust in the ultimate good and also calls on us to act in accordance with that trust. Hope demands an element of resilience and agency which optimism doesn’t require. Only hope will triumph in the face of the trials of the year ahead.