Message forwarding in Opportunistic Networks (OppNets) is very much influenced by factors like nodes’ dynamics and their movement pattern. A key challenge, however, is the uneven spatial distribution of nodes (mobile devices capable of wireless communication), leading to imbalanced participation of nodes in message forwarding and potentially compromising network sustainability due to premature node failures. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an optimized version of the Prophet routing protocol to enhance network longevity. Our approach first identifies the areas within the network with a high concentration of nodes having high message transfer termed as active zones and the nodes are termed as active nodes. Inherently, energy and memory (buffer) consumption is more for active nodes than other nodes (normal) of the normal regions. We then introduce a heuristic optimization technique aimed at improving network sustainability by efficient and optimized utilization of energy and memory of nodes that prohibits early ceasing of some active nodes. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvement in residual energy levels and buffer usage compared to the original Prophet routing without compromising message delivery probability and latency.