Why We Doubt Everything

We didn't lose faith, we never learnt it

It’s often said that my generation has lost faith. We are losing faith in God, losing faith in love, losing faith in the future. But I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Closer to the truth, I think, is we never learnt faith to begin with.

The psychologist Erich Fromm saw faith and doubt as character traits. Rather than having faith in something specific, faith for him was a way of seeing the world, a disposition of the soul, a temperament. For Fromm, faith meant not only religious belief, but a feeling of deep trust in ourselves, in others, and in life itself. This is what my generation did not develop. We are a chronically doubtful generation.

Understandably, since we live in a culture of doubt. Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed. We have everything, except anything that holds humans together. Whatever we try to have faith in is mocked, destroyed, or disappears too fast. And so we doubt. We question everything. We doubt what it means to live, what it means to love, what it means to be a good person, why any of that matters. Nothing is certain. And so, no, we aren’t so much in doubt as to whether we will live tomorrow, but whether there is any point to.

What is it like, to grow up this way? It’s hard to do justice to it. It’s a feeling of constant confusion and indecision. Never knowing the right choice, always unsure of ourselves, checking with others over and over. Immediate distrust of everyone. Suspicious of anything good; hardly surprised by hurt. Heart never fully in things, always holding back. Some of us are stronger in defending ourselves against doubt; others are completely consumed. They doubt everything: who they are, what they want, what they think, what they feel, what they are supposed to feel. Doubt shadows over anything good. Doubt clouds promises or proof. It is draining, exhausting, to exist in disbelief.

We doubt God, for an obvious example. This is the least religious generation in history. Apparently young women have “abandoned” religion, are “fleeing” the pews, and forgetting faith, when really I think many of us never knew it. This is a generation that doesn’t understand how to have faith, never learnt the habit. And adults shrug this off because they think this is simply doubting the existence of God, but no, this is more than that, this is doubting good. This is not just a lack of faith in religion; this is a lack of faith in right and wrong. More and more of us doubting morality, seeing no benefit to being a better person, because why, what does it matter?

Then we doubt our relationships, each other. Young people are crippled by doubt about relationships, utterly crippled. Scroll through the attachment forums, listen to the confessions and conclusions, read about relationship anxiety and relationship OCD, look at the labels and diagnoses, the endless, endless doubt over who to be with, why be with anyone, the agony and confusion. The sexual revolution destroyed trust and now we better be doubtful, how else can we protect ourselves? So we second-guess everything. We hesitate and hold back. And I always think this about falling marriage and birth rates; I am just not persuaded that so many young women object to having families for ideological reasons. We don’t dislike marriage, we doubt it. It will never work, so why try.

And we doubt, ultimately, ourselves. We doubt what we believe, doubt what we see, doubt our own judgement. We wait for influencers to insist on how we should live, experts to educate us on what we should think, activists and algorithms to tell us which version of right or wrong is trending. We doubt everything, down to our deepest human instincts.

So young people haven’t lost faith, but have been trained to doubt. Not only by culture, but by companies that profit from our uncertainty. Industries designed to introduce and indulge doubt. Social media, dating apps, the mental health industry—all promise to solve the very doubt they depend on. For every uncertain feeling the medical industry has a diagnosis, an explanation, an expert at hand. For every doubt about who to be with, dating apps present a new person, a premium package, a faster algorithm. But it is all a devil’s bargain. These industries feed exactly what they promise to fix. The mental health industry promises peace of mind while making us question everything we feel. Dating apps help us find the one while making us doubt they will ever be enough. Clickbait promises the real truth so often we lose faith in truth itself. And now add AI: machines giving us all the answers while making us doubt our ability to reach them ourselves. Doubt your decision. Doubt your wording. Doubt that what you wrote sounds like a normal human, so ask a machine. Without faith we have to depend on these things to think for us, write for us, decide for us, matchmake for us. And it’s the faithless who feel they have to obsessively arm themselves with boundaries and red flags and dating checklists, who retreat from relationships or demonise the opposite sex, not because they are empowered but because otherwise everything feels so hopelessly out of control, so painfully ambivalent, because in a world without faith doubt is our only defence.

We have agency, of course. We aren’t controlled by these companies. But I think we buy into this because we have this delusion that doubt keeps us safe, somehow. That by staying doubtful about relationships, about ourselves, about right and wrong, we are safer, more protected, better prepared for betrayal or abandonment. So we keep our options open, our possibilities endless, our doubts alive. We doubt because to have faith would be terrifying.

And we want everyone else to be uncertain, too. We delight in each other’s doubt. If you have a strong moral conviction people try to talk you out of it, want you to water it down, get you to give in. If you stand up and tell the truth people will start saying there is no truth. If you are sure about your relationship, excited about your marriage, people will worry for you, ask if you have thought it through, help you search for red flags. They will call your hope naivety, your faith in the world privilege, your convictions an agenda, because faith in a world of doubt is threatening. Chronic doubt is contagious. The modern world wants you to delay and question; it wants you to waver and hesitate; it wants you to be anything but sure. Doubt that commitment; doubt that promise you made; doubt the good path you are on; doubt your behaviour is really so bad; doubt that it would matter if you threw it all away.

Which is why what worries me most is not wokeness or progressive politics but this quieter cultural messaging—this soft, cloying liberalism that whispers nothing matters, if you blew it all up who cares, if you walked away who’s to judge, sure your ancestors made it work but what do they know? What’s the harm? Why not?

I worry because young women like me were raised with only one vision of hell. Now our only nightmare is being restricted by religion, by a relationship, or burdened by responsibilities. But what if hell is also the opposite? What if hell isn’t the faith that makes you stay, but the doubt that makes you leave? What if sometimes the devil is not the voice keeping you trapped, but the one whispering that you are being restricted, wronged, held back—deserve a fresh start? Have we ever considered that the most dangerous ideology might not be the one asking us to have faith through hard things but the one training us to doubt what is good, to see something that should be treasured as a trap?

We made a generation afraid of being controlled by faith but not nearly enough of being controlled by doubt. Especially in romantic relationships, where many young women were taught to be terrified of one outcome only: being trapped in an unhappy marriage. But sometimes I wonder if by being raised to never settle, never back down, and always put ourselves first, we have become a generation only good at giving in. Girls grew up being told that an empowered woman is always willing to walk away, until this is the only habit we have, until we only learnt how to leave, and have forgotten that sometimes the strongest people are the ones who know how to stay.

Because the truth is, doubt is far more restrictive than faith. Those without faith can’t be selfless or decisive or sacrifice, because they can’t commit to anything, not fully. They are suspended in doubt. And maybe doubting everything and everyone means you don’t get betrayed as badly or walked all over, but you also can’t be good, can’t be generous, can’t be grateful, can’t be patient, can’t love or fully be loved, because doubt gets in the way of doing anything real. Why be good when you could still get betrayed? Why care for this person when they could abandon you someday? Why sacrifice when they could stab you in the back? Why have children when you might regret it? Why get married when you might change? Why learn this skill when the world will change? Why be honest, why be humble, why have integrity?

Chronic doubt also makes you very vulnerable. Without faith the world can convince you that you are a bad person, in the wrong relationship, wasting your time, at any moment. Without faith you are prey to culture, to clickbait, to industries profiting from uncertainty. Prey to a world that can talk you out of the truth, can make someone who has everything feel that it’s not enough, can convince those who should be on their knees with gratitude to throw it all away.

And we have to ask ourselves, who is it we admire? Who do we want to be? Does anybody really admire doubtful people, or love stories of hesitancy and holding back, yet that’s exactly what we encourage? We celebrate lifelong marriages, we praise decades of determination, but keep telling young people not to do that. Don’t commit too young, don’t compromise at this age, you can never be too sure. We admire the milestone but discourage what it takes to actually get there. And this is cruel, I think, to warn young people away from the very thing we respect. What is love, if not faith and devotion when it seems safer to doubt? What is life, if not risk and courage when you have reasons to hold back? In romantic relationships you don’t commit when there are no obstacles, you commit because there are obstacles, because anything that lasts a long time will come with reasons to leave, because we are all hard to love, you commit to kill the doubt and start the adventure. And the people I admire most in my life are those who were dealt one tragedy after another, but even when the whole world conspired against them, when the cards were stacked, did not fold their hand but had faith. And it’s not luck to be that way, not fortune or privilege, but a disposition, an orientation, a habit, practiced, day by day, in the face of every reason to doubt.

We have not learnt how to live like this. Our doubts and demands get in the way. And this is a very hard thing to admit, how hard it is to be selfless. But I find that to be the case, and I am convinced it is harder for this generation, with the least encouragement, the least stigma and shame about straying, the fewest examples to follow. We are expected to learn loyalty in our late twenties, to teach ourselves the value of compromise and sacrifice or find out the hard way, we are left to learn it from podcasts. And while we seem to accept that this generation hasn’t had the community to practice social skills, we forget that we haven’t had the culture to practice selflessness either. No neighbours to try kindness with. No bonds we can’t easily break. No obligations to learn loyalty. We live in a world of strangers, with so few expectations. Our ancestors put customs and traditions and reminders in place because they knew how hard it is to be selfless, to commit to other people. Now some of us are trying it for the first time in our twenties and it feels terrifying.

And this is why it kills me when people argue that we all have complete agency and can’t talk about culture. What, the children who grew up on graphic online porn are suddenly going to know how to love someone for life? What, the generation taught to always put their freedom first are suddenly going to be great spouses, not feel terrified and trapped and restricted? What, the generation raised to swipe through each other like objects, consume each others’ lives like content, that won’t affect their character at all? Their ability to love? What, girls who never saw a glimmer of affection between their parents will grow up and magically let their guard down, feel fine to commit and start families? We want change but won’t look at why young people are this way, won’t lead by example, won’t encourage what it actually takes. We tell them to delay commitment well into adulthood, and then expect them to randomly make it work when they meet someone, suddenly able to cope with compromise and sacrifice. No, we cannot wish this world were different without first facing the consequences of what we have done.

Only once we do that, can we make better decisions. And for my generation, I think that means worrying less about finding someone trustworthy and more about our ability to trust anything. Less about whether we will find love, but whether we will be too doubtful of it when we do. Maybe the real nightmare is not that we won’t find someone loyal but we will discover, one day, with horror, that we are only capable of being loyal to ourselves.

Life has always been a battle between faith and doubt. But this might be the defining battle of our age. We have to keep deciding to have faith. And it is terrifying. But we can practice, deliberately, the opposite of doubt, we can try devotion, see how trust feels, attempt certainty, again and again. We can practice faith in ourselves, faith in other people, some cosmic faith that if we act in the right way, if we are honest and good, the world will order itself around us. As Christopher Lasch put it, this is not “a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best”, but a “disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

We need to teach the next generation not to fear faith but to watch for doubt. That walking away is not always courage but sometimes cowardice. We distrust each other enough now; we don’t need any more red flags or reasons to be suspicious. What we need to learn now is loyalty. We need to work on something more than our capacity to doubt, more than our exhausting ability to detect red flags, to draw boundaries, to criticise and call out. Now is the time to work on our waning ability to love, to depend, to forgive, to stick with it, to have some hope.

Doubt is a dangerous thing, more dangerous than we think. Doubt is the first feeling before the fall, the beginning of destruction. It is what calls us away, tempts us to turn back. So we have to get up every day and kill our doubts. They are not making us safer, or less vulnerable. The devil comes in doubt. And the only weapon we have in this world is faith.

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