What is HopeCore?: Here’s how this TikTok trend is helping improve your mental health.

One of the key rules for creating viral content is not to use something like “The dog bites the man” but “The man bites the dog”. This is the criterion by which something can be made a subject of public conversation. This is why if you open a newspaper (that is, if you travel back in time and find a newspaper), you will realize that the vast majority of what is published is news about something bad that happened: murders, robberies, political corruption, kidnappings, protests, etc. The world seems like hell. The cure for this is HopeCore.

What we are experiencing today as a species is an anomaly. For most of human history, at first you couldn’t know what was happening on another continent (or even in the next city), and then, when such a possibility became available, the information was scarce and its relevance was very insignificant. Today we are constantly bombarded with news from all over the world.. If you wish, you can enjoy reading all the details of the latest session of the South Korean Parliament. If used poorly, this knowledge can be poisonous.

In such circumstances, it is quite easy to forget the most important rule. Because the information overload that the Internet makes possible can make you think, Chicken Little-style, that the sky is always falling. Just by opening the Google Chrome app on your phone, you can find a series of recommended articles: natural disasters, superstar divorces, assassinations of political dissidents, all of this comes from distant lands that may have little impact on your reality.. Constant exposure to the world’s crises may convince you that these problems are hopeless and that hope is for fools. We all need something to help us remember that news is news precisely because what is reported is unusual. HopeCore is something.

What is HopeCore?

HopeCore is the best TikTok trend for your mental health. It has dominated Chinese social media for the past couple of months. Any video with the hashtag #hopecore and Evergreen by Richy Mitch and the Coal Miners in the background (the trend’s signature song) has the potential to rack up millions of likes. The first three videos that appeared received more than three million likes, which means that the number of views must be in the tens of millions. It was born as a response to the so-called “doomscrolling”, which describes the act of consuming negative news.

Messages such as “Appreciate Life,” “Remember What’s Important,” and “Life is Beautiful” are central to the HopeCore video. The videos themselves consist of encouraging clips. Moments of pure joy that move you. Some examples are: a soldier returning from war and dressing to surprise his children to tears, the reaction of a deaf child hearing his mother’s voice for the first time, parents playing a prank on their son who faints from laughter, a group of students pretending to fight and then surprise their teacher by singing her birthday, among other wonderful moments.

HopeCore is a surprising exception to the rule. After the surge in depression and loneliness around the world caused by the pandemic, it’s encouraging that there are emotional oases to remind us how lucky we are. Because all people have, to a greater or lesser extent, experienced moments of devastation, undoubtedly accompanied by moments of joy. HopeCore is necessary because people tend to remember bad times more than good times.. This is how our brain works.

It has been proven that negativity attracts much more attention than positivity. This is believed to be related to our survival instinct. make a possible danger more interesting to us than a possible benefit. According to this study, using the words “hate” and “worst” in the title of an article increased the number of clicks compared to titles that used the words “love” and “best.”

With this in mind, we can exercise self-control to limit the time we spend wallowing in the suffering of others. A little of this is needed to stay informed, but there is also HopeCore, which will give us a good balance.