Narratives of Hope

How Stories Shape Our World—and Our Future

Jun 16, 2025

Who doesn’t love a good story? As humans, we are hardwired for stories from our earliest days gathered around the campfire and they shape the way we understand the world. They educate, inform, and protect us, but they can also be used to mislead and confuse us. This post looks at how stories form the narrative frames we use to make meaning in the world and why we need to share narratives that explain not only what’s going wrong but also what’s going right. Rather than fighting over limited resources with a scarcity mentality, we have to offer compelling visions of hope and possibility that counter the endless negativity and chaos that surrounds us. These are challenging times, and maintaining our belief in a better future is critical for finding our way forward. Our narratives are our future and storytelling has never been more important.

The Power of Story

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’
- Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

Cautionary tales are very important… But if that is all you have, you risk nihilism.
- Becky Chambers, author, Wayfarers series and Monk and Robot novellas

If promising innovations and shifting practices are the boat that will sail us to the other side of the ocean, compelling narratives and effective storytelling are the wind in the sails. Narratives are stories that have a moral point which help us to make meaning in the world. When mutually consistent and reinforcing narratives are taken together, they form narrative frameworks that add depth and complexity to that meaning, reinforcing core messages and in the repeating, entrench them in our minds. Storytelling is the ability to take a story and in the artful telling of it, move our hearts and minds, evolving and shaping the narrative frameworks that define our understanding of the world.

Right now, we are surrounded by all the wrong narratives. Wherever you turn, you hear stories of corruption, suffering, and diminishing resources that foment fear and anxiety. These challenges are real, but people are also finding joy, making new discoveries, and solving seemingly intractable problems. We rarely talk about those stories. As humans, we make sense of the world around us based on the narratives we hear, and when the dominant narrative is doom and gloom, that is what we believe. In our frenetic lives, we have little time to slow down and investigate matters for ourselves, so we connect the dots between our own experiences and the stories we hear. If those stories are negatively biased, our conclusions will be, too.

This principle applies equally to our vision for the future. Media executive Shabnam Mogharabi points out that today “we bring our nightmares to life more than our utopian dreams,” citing as an example Amazon Prime’s all-time biggest hit Fallout, a post-apocalypse drama set in Los Angeles in the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe. The show is reflective of a larger trend – between 2010 and 2014, dystopian movies doubled in number, outpacing total movies, which only grew by 82 percent, according to Parrot Analytics's Content Panorama. And while we all know disaster stories and negative headlines attract the most attention – in journalism “if it bleeds, it leads” – they do not lead to positive outcomes for mental health and well-being, and are certainly not a balanced way of representing the state of the world and the long arc of social progress.

Imagine what could be different if we prioritized positive narratives that reflected a realistic and achievable future where everyone had the opportunity to flourish, living within the limits of what the planet can sustain. Might beliefs and behaviors shift if we could imagine and project ourselves into such a world? Social cognitive theory shows that people’s beliefs about what is possible, for themselves and the world, are based on what they see other people like themselves believing and doing, as shown by Stanford University professor Albert Bandura, who pioneered social learning theory and was considered the father of behavior psychology.^[1] He demonstrated that people’s beliefs will shift when they see “social proof” of others like them thinking and living differently. Storytelling can provide that social proof.

A Stanford graduate student working with Bandura once told me about a study he was conducting of two older women living in similar fishing villages in Peru. One village had been a “company town” where the company had recently left, taking jobs and economic opportunity with them; the other had always struggled with poverty. The first woman did not believe she could survive; the other was inherently entrepreneurial, building a small shack from sticks and selling fish by the side of the road. When the student showed the first women a short film about the entrepreneurial woman and her success, she refused to believe it was true and offered myriad reasons why her situation was different. But when he went back six months later, she had set up a shack of her own, was selling fish by the roadside, and her economic situation was improved.

What if we invested more in stories of hope and possibility? Change may not be immediate, but we know that once people realize something is possible, they no longer accept the mental constraints that limited their ability to make that leap forward. Telling the stories of what is working, and not just what is broken, is a critical step toward helping people see the possibilities all around them. As I’ve outlined previously, many of our efforts over recent decades have in fact been extremely effective and there are a number of positive trends and opportunities we can build upon. We simply haven’t prioritized telling those stories. Impact investor Peter Cafferkey observed, there are not just “points of light” but actually “quite a lot of light all around us,” so we have to get better at telling those stories and developing a narrative for the future we want.

There are many forms of compelling storytelling. Nonfiction has always been a key form for understanding history and shedding light on the state of the world. Over the last thirty years, documentary film and television in particular has become indispensable. More than books or expert lectures, documentary films are now the way many people come to understand complex issues or see into the multidimensional lives of those different from themselves. With a relatively brief investment of time, they offer an in-depth look at issues, cultures, identities, and realities that are both affirming to those who live in those worlds and eye-opening to those whose life experience is different.

Raising our boys, my husband and I peppered our family movie nights with a variety of socially-relevant documentaries that looked at subjects like the history of racism in the US (Thirteenth), the state of our education system (Waiting for Superman), healthcare as a human right (Bending the Arc), climate change (An Inconvenient Truth), and the challenges facing women and girls globally (Girl Rising). Watching these films together sparked family conversation and led to a deeper understanding of the social context in which we live than our boys would otherwise have experienced, and as adults they point to them as helping to shape their world view as much as what they learned in the classroom.

While documentary film has unique power to go deep on complex social issues, I also want to take a moment to reinforce the importance of journalism in providing timely, fact-based information about significant issues and societal developments. Journalism plays a critical role as the watchdog of democracy and we depend on it to hold those in power accountable – locally, regionally, nationally and globally. Journalism today is under attack like never before, and it’s important that we all do what we can to maintain the integrity of the press.

With so many challenges facing journalists in the current environment, it’s not surprising that we don’t hear as much about what’s been going right in the world. I am grateful to journalist and author David Bornstein and his colleagues at the Solutions Journalism Network for continuing to weave stories about people, institutions, and communities working toward solutions into the newsroom culture and journalism ecosystem. Interestingly, data shows that news stories with a solutions orientation heighten audiences’ perceived knowledge, their sense of efficacy, and their engagement with the issue and the news outlet.^[2] There’s no shortage of opportunities, but it is challenging to shift the newsroom culture, which prizes investigative journalism focused on corruption over stories about what’s working and why.

Finally, in addition to the role of nonfiction storytelling, we increasingly understand that fiction is instrumental in making the unseen real, illuminating challenges behind closed doors where documentary filmmakers cannot go or bringing to life the stories that help us understand dynamics and possibilities as they emerge. According to filmmaker, writer, and serial entrepreneur Mehret Mandefro, fiction is more honest than fact because it is more explicit about who made it and why. She says with fiction, learning happens through invention, allowing the possibility of suspending judgment, disordering reality, and re-experiencing our lives from a distance. “The sharpest point of the spear is expanding possibilities,” and fiction is a critical tool to move us past absolute thinking and create room for nuance and individuality. This includes a broad array of forms and styles, from shorts to feature-length films and from telenovelas to epic Bollywood dramas.

All of which is why I have been thinking more about the role of science fiction and fantasy worldbuilding and am inspired by new movements such as Hopepunk and Solarpunk. These subgenres reflect the next generation’s unwillingness to accept messages of despair, instead creating a literary and artistic movement that envisions a sustainable future intertwined with nature and community. They represent one example of that “sharpest point of the spear” and we need many more like them. Without a marketplace of storytellers and artists using a variety of forms and strategies for connection, we do not have the culturally appropriate and diverse tools needed to advance empathy, understanding, and social progress.

In summary, storytelling and narrative have never been more important to move us away from a scarcity mentality and make vivid the inspiring futures we want. We need to invest in more storytelling about what’s working today as well as aspirational visions of what is possible tomorrow. In my next post, we’ll look at how the narrative infrastructure that we rely on to access and distribute stories is increasingly under threat. From potential cuts in public funding to what’s available via streaming to the rise of artificial intelligence, many factors contribute to what many see as a crisis in the media entertainment industry. Stay tuned!

The Elephant & Butterfly

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