Fifty years have elapsed since Hadley Cantril (1965) published his work on the Pattern of Human Concerns. His line of inquiry has stood the test of time. In late 2012, the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS) replicated Cantril’s 1960s questions and methodology to elicit South Africans’ hopes and aspirations and worries and fears for self and country and their ratings of where self and country stood – past, present and will stand in future. Although Cantril’s ‘ladder‐of‐life’ scale is still regularly used as a measure of subjective well‐being, to our knowledge his full line of preliminary questioning has not been fielded again to date. Our study found that South African aspirations for self were mainly material ones for a decent standard of living and the means to achieve this goal. Hopes for the nation concentrated on economic and political progress to consolidate South Africa’s democracy. A large number of personal and national hopes were mirrored in fears that these aspirations might not be met. Cantril’s method also allowed us to review the main concerns and ratings across the diverse groups of citizens that make up the ‘rainbow nation’. There was a substantial degree of consensus on top hopes and fears but levels of standing on the Cantril ladder of life were still graded according to apartheid‐era inequalities with black South Africans scoring lower than other race groups. Nonetheless, the majority of South Africans rated their present life better than five years ago and projected life to get better in future. Such optimism may place considerable pressure on the state to deliver on personal and societal hopes as the country enters its third decade of democracy.