Asklemmy

I never had a reason to trust them to begin with, tbh.

I'm not sure what the meaning of this statement is. As i see it, you have to trust your community at some point because as a child you're not self-suffucient on a basic level. You need care from your family, schooling from your community, and if you take higher studies you need institutions to invest in your potential (be it by public funding like in most European countries, or by a loan). And that is just on the first level. Secondarily, the school in your community needs institutions too, and your family needs a job from the community, which probably also rely on institutions. You rely on them, they rely on others, so you rely on those others too.

In order to do all of that, before you even really have real life choices, you have to trust your family, your community and your institutions (thus, your Country).

Once you start having a real choice on what to do, then I can accept you might lose trust even if still having to rely on some of these. And you can work in a job that has very little to do to your community. Which is close to the situation I am living, actually.

So you lost that trust that allowed you to grow up to adulthood, because now you have a choice and you don't like what you see. Which is fair, we are all caught up in individualism, we know that we need to have a way out of situations by ourselves. That's why money is so central in our life: if things go wrong in our community, we will need money to convince others to grant us services and goods to cover our needs.

But that has more to do with material needs, not with "purpose". Nothing really stops us from trusting our community for non-material things, such as a sense of purpose. We just decide not to do it out of habit of being individualistic.