You are drowning in ruin.
Everything seems to only go in one direction. News always confirms what you already suspect. It's the same thing every day. Everything is only going to get worse.
If life really sucks, you don't want to spend all your waking hours worrying about depressing predictions that everything is only going to get worse.
Just opening my phone and scrolling makes me angry. The truth is, I don't want to see any rays of hope.
Are you angry?
You want to be angry, you want to be sad, you want to know how bad everything is. I want something hard. Something dark. The worse it gets, the better it gets. There's no light at the end of the tunnel.
good. you are an addict. It makes you miserable, but you're hooked. You can't stop it. You're like a cracker stuck at a safe injection site, but instead of a dilapidated room and misty eyes, you're hunched over an iPhone on a couch next to an air conditioner.
Doomerism is addictive.
mainline apocalypse
It's the modern drug of the internet. It's like falling into a hole over and over again. You fall and fall some more. Then, curious as to how far it will last, you start running at full speed towards the black abyss.
You seek out increasingly obscure accounts and sources. We want to feel like the apocalypse is just around the corner. You'll want to know everything bad first so you can say “I told you so” when your nightmares (secretly fantasies) become reality.
You want to be as depressed as possible about the state of the world. There is no future. That's what you say. I'm happiest when I'm sad. It's your little secret, but you'll never tell it. You can't. For the greater good, we must pretend that we are destined.
I don't want to fix it. You don't want a solution. In fact, when I see a solution, I get so irritated that I quickly scroll past it. Deep down you want to hear over and over again that everything is hopeless.
It's dark. It's twisted. And that can only exist in times like ours. Compared to most other periods in history, there is relative abundance, good medical care, and a fairly predictable life. These are the conditions of Doomerism.
If life really sucks, you don't want to spend all your waking hours worrying about depressing predictions that everything is only going to get worse. No, you would expect any kind of lifeboat. It doesn't matter what your wishes are.
Doomerism is a type of LARP created by the internet and affluence-induced boredom.
online on terminal
The key to Doomerism is the abstract nature of the engine. Doomerism is most often based and derived primarily from news and social media. True driving force is rarely found in real, concrete life.
The main drivers tend to be distant, abstract, or primarily in the digital realm. The more we move from the physical world to the digital world, the more we stray into the realm of fatalism.
All soulmates will eventually come online. Of course, it's possible to feel depressed offline as well. Tragically, too many souls are lost in the dark maze of recession.
However, this is not fatalism. All destructive people are undoubtedly addicted to speech, social media, or the news cycle. These abstract digital forces are a large part of the daily concerns of disruptive people. For the doomed, life and livelihood all but evaporated. All that remains is discourse addiction and destruction.
Treatment for doomerism
Doomerism is a serious disease, but it can be cured. The first step in treating doomerism is to regain one's agency and reassert control over one's personal sphere.
A stream of news, discourse, the latest and greatest outrage fodder has no value in your personal world. They do not help you develop your own culture. They will not positively impact your personal growth or quality of life in any meaningful way.
All they do is distract you from control in your personal realm. They draw more and more attention to the areas in which they are powerless, while relinquishing any hope of influencing the areas in which they are most capable.
critical realism
Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be interested in world affairs and politics. Of course not. However, you need to put these things in the right place. We must realize that too much obsessive doom and depression is like a spiritual cancer. Even if the analysis of fate is correct, it is not useful in a positive sense. It's worthless.
To overcome fatalism, we must return to what is real and personal. You have to learn to accept the things you cannot change and realize that all meaningless depressing discourse is like a drug that wants to drag you to the toilet.
It may feel like it's very important and you need to know it, but it's actually not, and the fact is you don't even know. Think for a moment about all the deeply depressing information you've learned, worried about, and forgotten. How much of your life have you lost?
We have a limited amount of energy to spend. The number of plates that can be rotated at one time is limited. If we focus every last drop of our mind and soul on things in which we are not involved, we become spectators of our own lives. I am observing carefully. Depressed by the results. Analyze what could have been done differently after the fact. It's fate.
The solution to fatalism is critical realism, not naive Polyanism. It's about allocating your efforts and emotions to the areas where your actions are most deeply felt.
The world will not change because of Doomerism. The world is indifferent to the person of destiny. If we make positive changes to where we are, things will change. We nurture our culture, live the values we believe in and positively impact the world around us.
