#Doomerism helps no one but those who seek to destroy you

[traegorn]

Is there really any hope with all of these horrible things going on..? I’m so scared and have no idea what to do. All I keep seeing is bad news. How am i supposed to be hopeful and not think that we’re all doomed

Their whole plan is to make you feel scared. They want to overload you and think there's nothing you can do. This feeling you have? That's their whole strategy.

Don't let it work. As long as you're breathing, there's hope.

All of these are executive orders and illegal actions. While the rule of law may be flimsier than most realize, this isn't Eastern Europe in the mid 20th century. Everything they do will either not hold up in a court of law or be something in the long term we can overturn.

Very bad things will happen to people in the meanwhile, but that doesn't mean there isn't hope or that you won't make it through this.

This is what you need to do: Make real, local connections. Find community. This is how we stay safe. Call your Democratic Reps and Senators if you have any and demand they obstruct and investigate. If you have Republican reps, still reach out and demand why they're letting Trump violate our freedoms -- the latter is less likely to do anything, but there's a small chance one of them might listen.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the news cycle, take a day off. Do not read, watch, or engage with it.

Dan Savage is a controversial figure for a lot of reasons we won't go into (especially on trans issues), but he did say something very good and important that I want you to take to heart:

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing

You need to find joy or else this is going to be too much. Hope is a choice we make every day, and when your enemy wants you miserable, joy is an act of defiance.

Find your joy and rub their bigot faces in it.

[thereddeath2093-blog]

2020A_CW-210 personal blog post

DOOM

By Steven Bunch

                 I spend a lot of time thinking about doom. It’s a rather abstract concept to preoccupy oneself with, but still I find myself living a “doomed” life. I listen to doom metal, I watch movies and TV shows full of doomed people on doomed worlds, I fantasize about the doom of the planet and my own personal doom. It even gets so much more specific to the point of absurdity; my favorite rapper is MF DOOM, my favorite super villain is Dr. Doom, I even play DOOM the video game.

               Half of my time spent thinking about doom, is trying to understand what the word itself really means. What is doom? What does it mean to be doomed? This as you can imagine inspires all sorts of philosophical questions about life and death, fate and inevitability, as well as many others. For all my pondering, I can’t really come up with a solid answer or something definitive. Sure, I could go with a typical dictionary definition of the idea, but it is more than that to me. It encompasses too much to be summarized and completed in a single or simple string of sentences. It’s an aesthetic, an ideology, and a state of being to me, something transcendental unto itself.

               The aesthetics of Doom are easily recognized but much like the idea itself, abstract and difficult to definitively explain. There are rather obvious tropes and visual elements that appear in art and media that are representative of what I’m talking about; ruined buildings, smoke filled skies, destroyed cities, dead bodies, anything apocalyptic really. However, the idea is much deeper than that. A piece of art, or anything visual, that can inspire feelings of dread, despair, or hopelessness exemplify this aesthetic in its purest forms. This has a place in the greater sense of the word and the idea of Doom itself.

               The ideology of Doom, unlike a lot of ideologies, is not one that is readily “chosen” in the same way one might choose to be a democrat or one would take up the cause of conservation. This is a kind of mentality that people usually fall into, and more so often than they might realize. Unlike the aforementioned aesthetics, the ideology is easily explained and familiar to most people. While chiefly the mentality is signified by feelings of doom or feeling doomed, it is a little more complicated than that. A true ideology of doom comes when this mentality is reflected out into the world as a whole rather than the individual. More than a simple feeling of personal helplessness, an ideology of doom encompasses the whole of humanity, to see the entire human race as doomed. As you can imagine, this is not a particularly hot-take, especially these days. That being said, embracing this fact would be the key difference between someone who is merely cynical and someone who is waiting with baited breathe for the apocalypse. Which is essentially what I’m talking about.

               People would scarcely admit to themselves, and even more so to each other, that they want the world to end. But the fact of the matter is that most people on some level do. Being a “doomer” has even become a popular internet meme. You get a sense of this feeling anytime someone has a particularly fashionable doomsday prophecy or something like this virus breaks out. People talk about “what if this gets worse?” and “what if this is the ‘big one’?” and they do so in very practical sensible ways, but it’s not hard to see something under the practical nervous façade everyone displays. There’s a part of it that is exciting to everyone. There’s a little voice in every one’s head that says “well fuck, if the world ends, I don’t have to go to work on Monday”.

Now that might seem rather funny like a Sunday newspaper comic, but there’s something deep in the psychology of that mindset. People don’t want to have to go to work, but more than that, they don’t want to be expected to participate in the societal machine that makes people go to work and earn money. Part of being an adult is accepting and fulfilling obligations that are somewhat thrust upon you from outside regardless of how one feels about those particular obligations. People are to a degree forced to participate in a society that they don’t agree with, or at the very least, do not like their position in. An apocalypse frees the shit scrubber and the burger flipper to eat his boss and give a finger to the man free of any guilt of any financial or typical consequence. All of us have someone higher on us on the ladder we wouldn’t mind making a meal out of.

Naturally this all extends outside of working relationships and obligations, but to the far reaches of civilization as a whole. Every person from pauper to prince is well aware, that the “system” in place is not only incredibly flawed and corrupt, but also antithetical to the very human soul itself. Obvious injustices such as bigotry, war, poverty; as well as little things like traffic, wasted time, rudeness, all support the notion that something is wrong .“The system” as your local pothead would call it, isn’t designed to crush people into machines and thoughtless consuming automatons, but one can’t be faulted for believing it so, considering how often said system produces such hollow beings. One of the mindset of “Doom” recognizes that the easiest way for these things to change, if they can be changed, is to wipe the slate clean entirely.

                This is the point where most people will close this page because I’m starting to sound like a cultist of some kind. But, those people aren’t remiss to do so. This is the kind of mentality that leads people into cults. Nearly every cult is a “doomsday” cult of some kind. Even Christianity for all its pomp and circumstance, is hardly ever different. Some of the most colorful and interesting passages of the Bible come from the book of Revelations and the prophecy for the end of the world. That’s how natural this all is, how prevalent it is in the human psyche. We have always been waiting for the end of the world, because unlike most animals, we are very poignantly aware of our own mortality, and this awareness manifest itself in strange ways. The strangest of all being embracement.

               This leads to my final point about Doom itself as a state of being, the embracement of death. Now again, I’m not trying to get all death-cult on you, but there is something to be said for not only accepting one’s own mortality, but embracing it. The fact of the matter is, life sucks, and not just these days or in a particular circumstance. Life, on the whole, is a tragedy. We are born into fragile bodies against our will, bodies that will very slowly decay with us trapped inside them. We are born into families we do not choose, with people who do not know but are entrusted with our entire existence, and then as an adult expected to serve someone else entirely. We are expected to work and struggle and to get sick and to suffer until we are physically incapable anymore. And if you whine about it, there will always be someone to chime in and remind you that your particular suffering isn’t even close to the breadth of suffering humans can experience because “someone always has it worse”. This is a world where a good death is considered “getting old”, which is essentially just fermenting and rotting longer than anybody else.  

               To be “Doomed” in this sense is a recognition and rejection of fighting these things. If we are all going to die, then there can be no “good death”. All death is natural, all the world is transient, a passing image. Nothing, least of all people, last forever. You spend a lot more time dead than alive in the grand scheme of things, and in that, being dead is more of the default state. That’s not to say that this is a suicidal feeling at all. This isn’t some philosophy of suicide in so much as it is a philosophy of embracing the inevitable end of all things. Someone in the “doomed” state of being isn’t going to go out and seek the end of their own life, but they aren’t the kind of person to shy away from it either. They allow themselves to fall away and let go of life’s worries much more readily. There is a reason that coming to terms with one’s own mortality is a huge part of Zen and eastern spiritual learning.

Why would you shy away from death and doom if the world is a bag of ass and you’re going to die anyway?

               After many hours wasted thinking, I have come to the conclusion that this is where I draw my artistic inspiration from. All of my world view is painted with a funeral veil. I find myself obsessed with the aesthetics of doom because I constantly live in that state of being. I can’t help but feel a compulsion to drive this aesthetic as far as I can. I feel the innate urge to draw visions of monsters, destroyed cities, and the sky shredded by cosmic terror so naturally. I can’t help but express this feeling through my artwork. Something within me wants to say to people, or remind them; “hey, not only are things like suffering and death very real, but sometimes they are the only thing that is. They are inevitable and they shouldn’t not be cowered from, but embraced and mastered.”

Now, maybe I’m projecting too much. (I tried not to be too first person, oh well). Perhaps I’m just trying to explain my own morbid fascinations I can’t otherwise do so with. Maybe I’m just too edgy for my own good or it’s because I have a very strong belief in the afterlife. Though it’s not out of the realm of possibility that there’s just some people out there (myself chiefly included) who are just sort of depressing, death obsessed freaks. However, I gamble a stamp, that considering how many depressing death obsessed freaks are really out there in the world, that I’m not entirely off-base when I talk about these things being prevalent in the subconscious of the human race as a whole. I believe something deep in the human psyche craves a change, craves destruction to make way for something new. Something in each of us wants these things no matter the cost, something in each of us, craves Doom.