OK, Doomer: How to stop the scroll and take control

You are drowning in doom.

Everything only seems to go one way. The news always validates what you already suspect. It’s the same thing every day. It all just gets worse and worse.

If life were truly terrible, you would have no desire to spend every waking hour brooding over depressing predictions about how everything is only going to get worse.

You open your phone and you scroll just so you can get mad. The truth is that you don’t want to see any glimmer of hope.

You mad?

You want to be mad, you want to be sad, you want to know how bad everything is. You want the hard stuff. The dark stuff. The worse it gets, the better it is. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

Good. You are addicted. It’s making you miserable, but you are hooked. You can’t stop. You are like the strung-out crackhead at the safe injection site, but instead of a dilapidated room and glazed-over eyes, it’s you hunched over your iPhone on your couch next to the air conditioner.

Doomerism is addicting.

Mainlining apocalypse

It’s a modern drug of the internet. It’s like falling down a hole over and over again. You fall down and then you fall some more. And then you kind of want to see how far it goes, so you start running as fast as you can down into the black abyss.

You seek out more and more obscure accounts and sources. You want to feel like apocalypse is right around the corner. You want to know all the bad stuff first so you can say “told you so” when your nightmare (secretly a fantasy) becomes reality.

You want to get as depressed as you can about the state of the world. There is no future. That’s what you say. You are happiest when you are sad. That’s your dirty little secret, but you will never say it. You can’t. You have to pretend like you are dooming for the sake of the greater good.

You don’t ever want to fix it. You don’t want any solutions. In fact, seeing solutions ticks you off, so you scroll right past those. Deep down, you want to hear over and over again that everything is hopeless.

It’s dark. It’s twisted. And it could only exist in a time like ours. Relative material abundance, decent medical care, and a fairly predictable life when compared to most other times in history. These are the conditions for doomerism.

If life were truly terrible, you would have no desire to spend every waking hour brooding over depressing predictions about how everything is only going to get worse. No. You would be hoping for any kind of lifeboat. Any kind of hope.

Doomerism is a kind of LARP product of the internet and abundance-induced boredom.

Terminally online

A key to doomerism is the abstract nature of the engine. Doomerism is almost always primarily based on, and derived from, news or social media. The real thrust is almost never found in real, tangible life.

The primary drivers tend to be far away, abstract, or found primarily in the digital realm. The farther one moves from the actual world and into the digital, the deeper into the realm of doomerism one wanders.

Every doomer is terminally online. Of course, it’s very possible to be depressed offline. There are, tragically, far too many souls lost in the dark labyrinth of depression.

But this is not doomerism. Every doomer, without question, is addicted to the discourse, social media, or the news cycle. These abstract digital forces take up the majority of the doomer’s daily concern. Life and living have all but evaporated for the doomer. All that remains is discourse addiction and dooming.

The cure for doomerism

While doomerism is a serious affliction, it can be cured. The first step to treating doomerism is reclaiming your agency and reasserting control over your personal domain.

The news cycle, discourse, or latest and greatest rage-bait are worthless in your personal world. They don’t help you cultivate your culture; they don’t positively impact your personal growth or your quality of life in any meaningful way.

All they do is distract you from taking control in your personal domain. They draw more and more of your attention into the domain where you are helpless while you give up any hope of impacting the domain where you are most able.

Vital realism

Of course this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take an interest in world affairs or politics. Of course not. But you must put these things in the right place. You must realize that overly obsessive doom and gloom are like a cancer of the spirit. Even if the doomed analysis was correct, it doesn’t help in any positive way. It is worthless.

To overcome doomerism, you must return to the actual and the personal. You must learn to accept the things you cannot change and realize that all the pointlessly depressing discourse is like a drug wanting to drag you down into the toilet bowl.

It might feel like it is gravely important and you need to know it, but it really isn’t and you really don’t. Think for a moment about all the extremely depressing bits of info you have learned, worried over, and then forgotten. How much of your life did you lose?

We only have so much energy to expend. We can only spin so many plates at one time. If we focus every last drop of our hearts and souls on that which we are not a part of, we become spectators in our own lives. Watching carefully. Depressed about the outcome. Analyzing what could have been done differently after the fact. Dooming.

The solution to doomerism is not naive Polyannaism but vital realism. It’s allocating your effort and emotion to the domains where your action is most profoundly felt.

The world will not change because of doomerism. The world is indifferent to the doomer. It will change if we make positive change where we we stand. Cultivate our culture, live the values we believe, and make a positive impact on the world around us.