It seems that society has shifted where you used to have to give an answer for the hope that was in you (1 Peter 3:15) where now it’s expected of you that you give an answer for the hope you don’t have. For me there is a real good reason for this because I have a visible physical disability which makes my every interaction with the world an incursion.

Yes they have gotten rid of those ugly laws of the early 20th century but don’t think things have improved much as people would like you to believe My whole life I have been rejected for jobs because of my disability and it’s gotten worse in the past three years. In fact one recruiter even blatantly said I need to somehow make people comfortable with my physical disability (as, as I already understood at the time, it was an incursion on the abled world). A subsequent interview I brought up my visual impairment about three quarters of the way through the interview and they were like, “we thought you couldn’t see”. At least they were honest.

I’m grateful for the Black Lives Matter chant, “no justice, no peace”, but I’d like to add to that, “no goodness, no hope”. I have found no goodness in the vocational world so am under no obligation to hope. People in power strongly dislike the fact that a lot of us are hopeless because hopelessness by definition means that something in the environment has to change in order to restore hope. Asking for goodness in the wasteland of late stage capitalism is just too much of an ask.

To take it further modern psychology’s imperative to hope makes even less sense than Christianity’s. With Christianity you ideally have a supportive community around you and (if you have the capacity to believe it) a good thing coming in the afterlife. Modern psychology (which is the primary driver of late stage capitalism) gives an imperative to hope without giving an imperative to virtue. People need to pay into the system via virtue to be able to withdraw from it in the form of hope. Goodness is what germinates hope, when there isn’t goodness people still want to be seen as good so they still give you the imperative to hope and trust. But this just does more harm than good as you are just immobilized by the blowback of shitty people.

Helping professionals generally have empathy but they can’t put them selves in the shoes of the average businessman who will be much more judgmental than them when it comes time to give jobs. Because if this they mistakenly believe you have more hope than you actually do.