#doomerism

[lazyscience]

Question - what should people do?

I am serious like a goddamn heart attack, what do you think posting "BUT SHIT IS REALLY BAD AND PEOPLE SHOULD FREAK OUT" without any kind of suggested action is good for other than feeling morally superior?

"but people need to KNOW" - why? Why do people need to stand in this paralyzing fire hose of negativity and horror UNLESS THERE IS AN ACTION ITEM IT'S POINTING TO? Why do people need to feel more scared and helpless? Why is that good, other than punishing "the liberals" or "the leftists" or "the centrists" or whoever it is you're still mad at about the election outcome?

What you are doing is saying "look at all this awful shit that's happened" - key word HAPPENED, as in, can't be undone - "you are not nearly upset enough about this!" - how is telling people they are gullible, stupid and wrong for not panicking and doomering accomplishing anything either?

Maybe, just maybe, if now is the time to act, SUGGEST ACTIONS, jesus christ.

Like for example, live voice calling, faxing, or paper-mailing their Senators and representatives about the funding freeze, since those are physical items that they have to interact with/cost money unlike emails that just disappear into filters. And also getting hold of your STATE governor/lege to let them know "fuck Trump, this is not what the people who elected YOU want."

Like supporting government unions so they can protect their members.

Like contributing to food banks, clothing drives, and organizations fighting homelessness to increase their ability to help if people start getting forced out of jobs.

Like supporting journalist-owned news outlets like RawStory and ProPublica.

Like volunteering and/or donating to civil rights organizations to advocate where these structures are being dismantled.

Like teaching people who don't know how to fucking read so we can eventually dig ourselves out of this goddamn hole.

Like all the shit on this helpful list of actions to take that are neither attending a protest or voting.

Like checking in on their colleagues and friends who are directly affected by this shit? I did this today (I am one degree removed because a lot of the funding from my department comes from NIH, but do not myself work for the federal government. And similarly, I know people at NCI/NIH, like actually meatspace know, and yes, I am very worried about them!)

How about instead of just screaming at everyone "it's too late! everything sucks! why aren't you all screaming everything sucks!" why don't you help people who already feel overwhelmed, scared and like they're too small and useless to make a difference even if they tried, to know what they CAN do.

Otherwise, you aren't hurting Spraytan Hitler and Wannabe Lex Luthor, you're helping them spread chaos, fear and defeatism.

Every time I see "um actually executive orders take time to implement" I want to shake you and actually point you at the literal communications and actions happening IMMEDIATELY in the federal workforce. Which is what these orders are targeting.

The Dept of Ed already put people on paid leave and took down 200 web pages and cancelled 2.6 mil in grant money. The National Institute of Health, which is the biggest federal funder of biomedical research in the country/world, just cancelled its grant review process because those grants and the reviewers were all trained to include diversity support statements. This is happening to the NSF. NASA already started putting employees who do DEI on paid leave and encouraged other employees to snitch on people. The CDC is not allowed to communicate with the public.

This is happening now. Who the fuck cares of it gets challenged in court? It's *happening now.* Reversing it in court in several months (if we're so lucky, which I am NOT confident in, actually) does not necessarily give people back their jobs (or put them in a position to accept them if they are legally forced to get a chance to return to them) and does not undo hostility in the workforce that this has sown and does not give out grant money that was withheld.

And it's not just DEI. it's Accessibility too. It's happening *now.* Policies are getting reversed, and people are going to lose their jobs. Period.

No one is looking at the news and actually reading it. Everyone is just biting their nails at the headlines and letting people falsely comfort them that they don't need to worry or do anything yet.

[reasonsforhope]

The present isn't a dystopia. It's just a complicated, chaotic, sometimes amazing, sometimes brutal world.

The future is, I think, unlikely to become a dystopia in the sense we imagine it. I saw this for two reasons:

1.

First, I say "the sense we imagine it" because dystopias are based on the idea that all hope (for humanity, usually, sometimes all life) has been extinguished forever, and the forces of dystopia shall never be overthrown.

I don't believe that kind of world is possible - a world where there is never more hope. A true end to history. I don't think it's ever possible for all humans to stop fighting, as long as we're here. I have lots of evidence to based this on, much of which is called "all of human history." (And eternal dystopia is especially impossible if you look at deep time - there have been five previous mass extinctions, and life is still here.)

But it will not come to that.

Here's why:

2.

We have already averted truly apocalyptic levels of warming.

Yes, read that again. Let it sink in. This is what the science now says. We have already averted truly apocalyptic global warming.

To quote David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, from his huge feature in the New York Times:

"Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years... The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse." (New York Times, October 22, 2022. Unpaywalled here. Emphasis mine. And yes, this vision of the future is backed up by the current science on the issue, as he explains at length in the article.)

So we've already averted truly apocalyptic warming, and we've already cut expected warming IN HALF in just the past five years.

The pace of technology, of innovation, of prices, of feasibility, of discovery, of organizing, of grassroots movements, of movements in other countries around the world, have all picked up the pace so fast in the last five years.

Renewable technology and capacity are both increasing at an exponential rate. It's all S-curves, ones that look like this:

-via The Economist, June 20, 2024.

How much more will we manage in another five years? Another ten? Another twenty?

I know the US is about to fucking suck about the environment for the next four years. But the momentum of renewable energy is far too much to stop - both in the US (x) and around the world.

(Huge shoutouts to India, China, and Brazil for massive gains for the environment in renewables, and Brazil for massive progress against Amazon deforestation.)

We're going to get there.

Say it with me. We're going to get there.

[meramyst18]

If you ever feel depressed about climate change (which I felt like that many many times), and you feel that no matter what you do it will not matter, so at the end, why should try? Just remember that that is exactly what big corporations want. If they don't have people speaking out and holding them accountable for what they're doing, then they're just gonna keep messing up the planet and fill their pockets even more.

Right now, more than ever, giving up is not something we can do. Not everything is lost, but the media doesn't show that because that will encourage people to actually do something.

It's easier to say "you know what, stop trying because the planet is gonna die anyways, duh" instead of saying "many governments are transitioning to clean energy, suing polluting companies, making more environmental advances, and cleaning up the oceans, so you should too!"

The media wants to discourage you, and if you are one of the influencers or people saying "give up", you are part of the problem too.

Keep fighting, keep recycling, keep thrifting, keep boycotting greed corporations, keep eating less meat, keep informing and most importantly, keep being hopeful! Hope, love and compassion are our stronger weapons, never forget that.

[expressingexperience]

[faerygardenparty]

also I apologize for my doomerism but I’m getting real sick of seeing “you survived through last trump election you can survive this one!” posts because motherfucker thousands of people did not survive and it’s privileged as hell to be able to say as much

[thisisnotafanaccount]

This is just a reminder that doomerism/losing hope in humanity was created by and for incels. They started pushing this "the West has fallen, humanity is doomed" message onto every social media platform and some of you believed it. Doomerism isn't about climate change, wars, etc., this mentality was based around complaining about women, queer people, and people of color and what they've "done" to "ruin" society. Please stop normalizing this message, and please stop allowing dog whistles to enter the mainstream. There is tons of positive change happening, which is what many of these "doomers" are really complaining about

[lesbiangender]

If you're struggling to have any hope right now I'd really encourage you to watch A Practical Guide to Systemic Change by Dr. Fatima. It's pretty long but the second half is something that has really been helping me cope with how horrible everything feels right now and has honestly inspired me to do more.

I'm not gonna attempt a TLDW here because I have to go get ready for work, but please try watching it. Don't get discouraged and stop trying to make things better. Don't give in to the doomerism.

[cybergrapeuk]

The most annoying sentence online, especially after current events, is "we're cooked".

It is a sentence that ends problem solving thought and encourages doomerism.

Instead, say "there's a problem, how do we go forwards from here?"

Start cooking instead of being cooked.

[la-dent-de-lion]

I know the future is uncertain, and right now things seem grim, but please, my friends do not give in. You are worthy of life, and it is our duty to each other and to ourselves to take the time that has been given to us and use it. Remember, joy is an act of rebellion. They want you dead, they want you paralysed with fear. DO NOT GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT!

[uboat53]

All right, I see enough of it going around that I need to address this doomerism among young Americans. Call this a LONG RANT (TM) or just an old man shouting from his porch if you will.

INTRODUCTION

Young people. The United States is not "falling apart". The world is not under threat of imminent collapse. Society is not coming apart at the seams, it is not going to disappear, and we do not need to prepare to replace it. The worst that will happen is that a lot of people will lose rights that they've gained over the last century and the government will become a whole lot less representative of the country it governs.

Don't get me wrong, this is bad, but it's not "start stockpiling dried food and weapons to prepare for societal collapse bad", and thinking that it is will stop you from doing a lot of the things that could be done to stop what's actually happening.

A BIT OF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The current state that we live in, particularly here in the US, is very new. Are the attacks on trans and gay people terrible? Absolutely. Is the return of white supremacy horrifying? Definitely. Are the efforts to deny rights to women deplorable? Yes. But you have to understand just how new many of the good things that are now under attack actually are.

I'm not even 40 yet and, when I graduated high school, 13 states still had "sodomy" on the books as a criminal offense. Gay people didn't even get the right to marry until I had already graduated college. The Violence Against Women Act didn't pass until I was almost out of elementary school. The Rodney King riots happened recently enough that I can actually remember watching them on the news.

And forget about me, Ruby Bridges desegregated the first previously all-white school in New Orleans in 1960. She's only turning 70 last year (as did the Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned segregation in the first place) and is very much alive. So are a lot of those people in the famous pictures screaming racist abuse at her. The US Supreme Court decision that established a right to interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia, 1967) isn't even old enough to retire yet and Martin Luther King Jr., who often feels like a fairly distant historical figure to us, would only be 96 this year if he had lived.

All of this is to point out that, not only are the rights we're defending actually fairly new in US history, much less world history, but that many of the people who opposed these rights when they were put in place are still very much around and they're still unhappy that those rights exist.

WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING

Here's the thing, what's really happening is not the destruction of the American political and social system, it's just a sustained effort to hijack and twist them. If the MAGA crowd have their way, the institutions of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Presidency, and the entire administrative state won't actually collapse or cease to exist, they'll just be changed such that they only represent the values and desires of white, Christian men. It'll be a disaster, to be sure, but it won't destroy the fundamental structure of how you live.

Frankly, what's the most creepy about it is how little you'll actually notice the change.

What you have to understand about government is that it's not some impartial reading of rules. There's a huge amount of discretion built into the system. And, to be clear, this is a good thing. No set of rules written in stone could ever hope to cover every situation that real people find themselves in. We allow officials at all levels to make judgement calls. They're guided by the rules, but they have a lot of room to make different decisions within those rules because we want them to consider the real-world circumstances.

Of course, given all of that, you can see how important the person in a given position can be. We've already seen a movement around the country focused on district attorney elections because, if you can replace a fire and brimstone conservative with a progressive or vice-versa, you can completely change how justice is administered in a particular jurisdiction.

MAGA conservatives have figured this out as well and they focus on it to a greater extent than just about anyone else. The death threats they send to, for example, election administrators aren't intended to destroy the apparatus of election management. They're intended to force the person out of the office for fear of their safety in the hopes that they can be replaced by a MAGA loyalist. As I said, the person is important.

This is happening now at just about every level, but many of those opposed to the MAGA movement misunderstand what's going on. They're not trying to destroy our governing institutions, they're trying to capture them.

THE HAZARDS OF DOOMERISM

The answer, of course, to what the MAGA crowd is doing is to outfight them. Polling fairly consistently shows that no more than about 30% of Americans actually believe MAGA nonsense and even less than that actively seek to put it into practice. If enough other people come out and reject their candidates, reject their ideas, and insist that authorities deal appropriately with their threats of violence, they will lose. And, let's face it, MAGA supporters are overwhelmingly older than the American population at large; if we hold them off long enough they'll die off, this isn't a group that's set to continue into the future.

By succumbing to doomerism, the idea that everything is already lost and that, rather than take over society, the MAGA crowd will destroy it, people are turning away from the one thing that could actually stop this takeover; political action. If you think that society is actively collapsing, you're not going to invest your time and energy in it, you're going to spend your time preparing for said collapse and attempting to shield yourself from the worst effects of a Mad Max world.

And, let's be clear, no amount of hoarding of dried food, guns, and seeds will do anything to protect you from a government that is committed to denying you basic rights. Doomerism, whether passively lying down and awaiting the end or actively preparing for the collapse of society, only distracts you from doing anything about what is actively happening.

CONCLUSION

Society is not about to collapse. I know it makes great disaster porn and gives people a sense of black and white certainty in a complex and often confusing world, but what's actually happening is that society and government are being captured one institution at a time by people who want to return to a time when only straight, white, Christian, cisgender men had any rights or representation in society. By embracing a narrative of societal collapse, you are disengaging from both society and government, making it easier for these people to capture them and, when society doesn't collapse, you're going to find that none of the things you've done to prepare for "the end" won't help you a bit.

This is the whole point, though, who benefits from you dooming it up? It's the people who want to do all the things that you don't like! They benefit from you giving up on society, they benefit from you failing to defend important institutions, and they benefit from you letting them get their people into important positions, so don't do that!

By giving up on society and becoming a doomer, you're letting all the things you dislike happen, but instead of society collapsing so that you don't have to deal with it, what's actually going to happen is that society will continue to exist under the control of people who want to take away all of your rights and opportunities. But here's the thing, that can only happen if you let it. Fascists (and that's exactly what the Moral Majority/Tea Party/MAGA/Whatever-they-call-themselves-next-week crowd are) make a lot of noise and threaten a lot of violence because they're trying to intimidate you into not fighting them, they're actually very weak and can't win if you stand up to them.

So fight back. Stop pretending that you're helpless and that nothing you do matters. Maybe you can't change the entire world by yourself, but every single thing you do adds up. Even just helping one person is enough, you could be the one to bring just one more person into the fight who tips the balance. More importantly, it's not a black and white, fascists win vs. fascists lose, situation; everything is in shades of gray. Every action, every good deed, every win makes the long term better than it would have been otherwise. If we lose trans rights but keep gay rights, that sucks, but it's still better than losing both and it means that we can focus our efforts on getting trans rights back instead of having to fight for both of them again.

Ultimately, though, doomerism isn't some brave position, it's the coward's way out. Giving up is exactly what the MAGA people want you to do, do you want to give them the win without even fighting for it?

[wyrd-wyrm]

Dear Friend, Dear Ant, Dear Earth and dirt and grass and tree. Dear Life.

Help Remind me today that the world is still beautiful. Help Remind me today that My life hasn’t ended yet. Help Remind me that doom is a mind set that is a sign of giving up, and not the truth.

I want to be happy in a very sad world and I want others to be happy too. So Friend, Beast, Earth, Dirt, Grass, Tree, Life…

Remind me I am still here and I can still love, and still live.

[whereserpentswalk]

Remember, whenever you think it's hopeless, when you think the system is inevitable, or that climate change can't be stopped, there is an oil executive whose very happy that you think that way. If you think it doesn't matter what you believe, remember that an entire ecosystem of propaganda exists to make sure people like you don't believe change can/should happen. If it takes knowing that someone truely awful doesn't want you being hopeful to make you hopeful, then let that be the reason you know that the world can be saved.

[reasonsforhope]

Something to remember when the climate anxiety and doomerism are coming for you:

We went from inventing flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years

I wouldn't count us out of the climate change fight just yet

[walks-the-ages]

For the record, no, there is not a "heat anomaly of 30c/86f hitting the North Pole on February 2nd 2025".

The current forecast for the North Pole on the five-day outlook (it's January 28th 2-25 as I post this, in response to a post from January 27th 2025) is between -15c to -22c. The high temperature for the day has a high of -13c, aka +8f.

There is absolutely no forecast I can find saying there's going to be "a high temperature of +86f in the North Pole", literally the highest temp I can see in a monthly forecast is a high daytime temp of 26f and 12f overnight, which is -3c to -11c.

No, the entire North Pole is not going to melt on February 2nd 2025.

The world is not going to end in a week.

All life on earth is not doomed by 2050.

Yes, call your reps, fight for climate protections, but don't go around screaming at people online that we're all "literally gonna die in 2050" because that's just straight up fearmongering and literally does not help anyone in any way.

Doomerism and panic does not do anyone any good, especially if you're spreading misiformation and fear mongering that is so easy to debunk.

[lostcybersoul]

Evangelion physical disks

[motziedapul]

Doomerism is a privilege. Many of you don't know how to identify privileges you have; this is one of them.