The Cultivation of Despair: How Modern Society Breeds Hopelessness

We live in an age of despair, unsurprisingly, for we have set up an array of circumstances most conducive to it. Consider contemporary society and what it is ordered towards. We raise children from young ages to have a broken ontology, that is, we have deprived them of searching, finding, understanding, or speaking of deeper meaning and values. They enter school systems where they are deprived of any Transcendent explanations for being, that privation supposedly demanded by the scientific method (thereby betraying an ignorance of both science and scientists). They are told that their lives have no value and that they exist by mere chance. They are exposed to this mantra for eight hours a day, given to them by people whom they are told are authorities, even if the youngsters are lucky enough to have decent home lives (which is becoming less likely).

They are deprived of heroes, for all those whom prior generations lauded have been smeared as misogynists, racists, and sinners against the new paradigm. Thus, their own stories, their trials and their successes, feel unique in that they are disconnected from the similar tribulations of others. A singular sense of unfairness at one’s own lot in life is the natural result of such a false understanding of the universality of pain.

They are given no moral guidebook aside from the lingering residue of a long-gone Christian society. They have a faint understanding that you shouldn’t encroach on another person’s rights, but in terms of how they ought to live their own lives, they believe in a mushy, subjective worldview that places no limits upon one’s personal desires. And likewise, if another person wants to engage in anything alongside you, consent is the only limit. Eventually, those who live their lives according to this mindset find themselves standing amongst wreckage—the inevitable consequence of unguided and unaccountable autonomy.

When tragedies strike, whether fault can be assigned or not, there is no source of calm within the chaos, no understanding of something greater than their own experience, and not even a minimal exploration of the redemptive capacity of suffering. It is all purposeless, and thus the pain is without a salve.

Cruelly, the society that espouses wanton hedonism has specific areas in which it demands religious adherence, and offers no forgiveness to those who contravene. If we have strayed from the ethos of the new paradigm, for example by speaking against one of the protected victim classes, society offers no capacity for redemption. The decades do not purge the stain of misconduct. There is no true mercy for the person who seeks to make changes and repair his broken life. The hardest teachings of real Christendom, such as those of forgiveness and repentance, have been discarded. If a man runs afoul of an ever-changing ethos, he is forever castigated.

On this view, community seems to offer only inevitable and unrelieved scolding, less appealing than the lonely shelter of isolation. But, we are not made for this kind of isolation. As a result of living against our nature, there is pain and a sense of purposelessness, and no real understanding of what needs to happen to relieve it. Buried under the darkness, increasing numbers seek escapes: drugs, alcohol, addictions, or even the more direct route: suicide.

Slumped before computers and seeking communion without risk or sacrifice, millions of people are now using AI for companionship: as surrogate friendships; as makeshift therapists; and even as romantic partners. They are isolated, and worse, they do not see human interaction as the correct course to fix their situation. These are ‘relationships’ without relation; deprived of destination and in which there is only one soul—one that reaches into a void. They are hopeless connections in a literal sense, for there is nothing to hope for in them.

While all of this is the norm for younger generations, older groups tend to engage in their own form of despair in which they slouch before a television instead of a computer in the evenings. Instead of cultivating one’s gifts and indulging the natural interests that are related to them, they stare blankly at devices in an attempt to fill the empty time and space yawning before us. It is a type of socially acceptable despair that has become normalized.

Yet we were designed for more. The goal of life is not simply acquisition, which is a cold and cruel way to value oneself and one’s neighbors. The gifts of friendship and community are not replaceable by an AI because friends are not data, and we are not machines. We have souls. That is the crux of this distorted worldview: It all hinges on the false notion that human beings are soul-less, value-less, replaceable, and interchangeable. If what materialists posit about humanity is true, then our existence is reduced to triviality and can be dismissed with a shrug. But if Christ is True, then we are summoned to a higher existence—to live as members of a Body, to nurture our gifts, cultivate communities, and not live in a state of insuperable despair.