(Hope and) despair

This’ll be the last post before my long-term marketing writer contract expires and I start trying to build a career as an author. So let’s talk about sin and despair for a minute. Don’t worry, it’ll all tie together.

Sin and despair

As I’ve gotten older a lot of the moral lessons from my Catholic upbringing have seemed more and more sensible. I’m either getting wiser or dumber; I think the former but it’s hard to know from the inside. One such lesson is about sin. The best teaching about sin isn’t the straightforward “break the rule and get punished” type. CS Lewis wrote about how moral law is like operating instructions for the human being, and a sin is something that doesn’t follow those instructions. In that understanding, sins aren’t bad for you because they’re wrong—they’re wrong because they’re bad for you. And they’re not just feelings; they’re choices and actions that cause damage, either to yourself, or to yourself and others.*

I think we all have feelings of despair sometimes, but the Catholics teach that despair is a sin. This bothered me for a long time. It seemed unfair, like kicking someone when they’re down.

However, with the understanding of sin I outlined above, this description of despair makes sense. The feeling isn’t the sin. To despair is to believe and act such that nothing good is possible. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether or not there is a personal, omniscient, omnipotent, good God that influences the universe, despair is still a harmful state to be in.

Choosing hope

And here’s the flip side of that realization: hope isn’t just a feeling either. You can’t make yourself feel hopeful any more than you can make yourself not feel despair. Hope means acting hopeful and proceeding as though your actions benefit yourself and others. This sounds glib in the face of serious evils and tragedies, but it’s also the basis for anything that can help.

So, I’m not trivializing these topics for people who have a far more challenging time than I do, but that’s the context when I say I’m hoping to start a career as an author. There are reasons for despair: reading for pleasure is on the decline, AI-generated slop is saturating the supply, and the economics of creative production have shifted towards self-promotion and personal branding, two activities that I have a sort of emotional allergy to. But I’ll try to act in hope and remember all the ways that those acts are good for me irrespective of their outcomes.

May the New Year both encourage and justify your hope for a better future.

* I don’t think it’s possible to act in a way that’s harmful to others and not yourself too, but that’s an interesting question. And the convincing thing about this understanding of sin is that it still makes sense and should still shape my actions even if God doesn’t exist.