Climate warming, far right rising, democracy eroding, huges setbacks un humain rights, hate crimes exploding, biodiversity dying, activism more ans more criminalized, etc…it seem society is living its last moments, and doomerism looks like the only rational option. So what prevent you from being a doomer despite all of this ?
It is all about perspective. Glass can always be half full.
Few examples:
- There is still a lot of work beeing done about climate changes. Polution was way worse 50 years ago in my country. Solar power is actually cheap enough and is taking over the world.
- After far right will not bring the prosparity it promissed, there will be a new age. Also if you are refering to Trump, this is his last mandate. (And after that he will probably go to prison)
Even if there a colapse is to be expected. There will always be the next day. And good people will raise.
There are still a lot of good people fighting and willing to fight for the good.
I see it only as a new cycle of “Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Good times create weak people. And weak people create bad times.”
It’s hard to articulate but probably the only thing for me right now is the sheer weirdness of everything. It feels like everyone’s perceptions of reality have been shaken loose and unusual things are more likely to happen.
So nothing concrete; just vibes. And uncomfortable vibes at that.
Also, chaos and upheaval lead to change and the most optimistic part of me hopes that whatever emerges from it will be defined by people who have had the courage to resist all of the fear, hate and greed.
Nothing. By definition, I’m already a “doomerist”, I guess.
And it just becomes worse when one gets “transcendental”. While everything you listed (“Climate changes, rise of far-right ideologies, erosion of democracy, huge setbacks in human rights, rise of bigotry and hate crimes, destruction and loss of biodiversity, criminalization of activism/union strikes, etc”) is enough to get a “doomerist” framework and existential dread, wait until you catch yourself gazing into the depths of the cosmic abyss, expanding from mundane events to atemporal, ineffable cosmic noumena, and realizing that everything was just the tip of a gigantic, Lovecraftian-like iceberg.
Cosmos’s indifferent to us. A supernova could explode within our galactic vicinity and vaporize the Earth in just a blink of our eyes, for example. Earth will be engulfed by a bigger Sun (Red Giant) in the future. Every living being, including us, is walking on a “thin” plaque floating above an enormous ocean of deep magma (ever thought of Pacific Ocean as being so enormous? Well, it’s nothing in volume compared to Earth’s magma).
This, my friend, is a stage of “doomerism” which I can’t describe how deep it is compared to the known “doomerism”.
Technically, I consider myself a nihilist, as the way I conceptualize things relates to nihilism (and, etymologically, I’m a “Nihil”-centered person, I sort of worship the “Nihil” a.k.a. the nothingness, so I’d be considered as a Nihil-ist). I’m not exactly Nietzschean because I never dived myself into Nietzschean books, although I like some of his quotes (the gaze into the abyss, for example). I’m just “nihilist” as in “there’s nothing: literally only The Nothing is”.
hegel’s revolutionary plasm
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“In the dark times, should the stars also go out?”
read hegel, play disco elysium. play disco elysium, read marx
This is because you get your perception of the world from social media and news.
If you would just stop following that, and walk outside, you will see that there is a normal world right outside your door.
I can’t even talk about normal things on social media. It’s a very limited place full of people who think they are fighting evil with their keyboards. And so many people needs fighting, because they are saying words that they don’t agree with. :)
Connecting with people through music.
The question is better but thus : what lead you to doomerism ?
The answer will almost certainly not be your lived experience or the lived experience of your loved ones. Instead the answer will probably be media consumption.
It is now well documented that news has both a negative bias, and also that excessive consumption is detrimental to health : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7187375/
So, :
- read less news.
- focus on your daily life in your community
- Learn meditate
Secondly, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you mention the ‘the last moments of society’ which is a very privileged and arrogant view to take, when there are people who have lived through war, lived through famine, lived through brutal oppression and come out the other side .
In fact, the dystopian picture you paint, is the lived reality for some people TODAY. So check your privilege.
Nothing. I won’t stop voting, but I’m old, tired, poor, mentally ill, and have been looking forward to the sweet oblivion of death since I was a small child. What about the country or planet is happening to make the future look bright to anyone, much less me? At best it’s all just meaningless noise.
If you find out, let me know…. All I’ve tried is organising and drinking, and they take the edge off but not enough
I’ve found drugs can help, too
The people I love still have many years left to live and I want to enjoy them
https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16. Myth of Sisyphus.pdf
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don’t know why and they probably don’t either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I’d push it because there’s a guillotine over the horizon. I’m arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it’d always mean existential damnation for me, but I’d purify my hate pushing it.
damn so im not the only one who read some Camus recently? i’m not even an existentialist, i just find the work comforting
Even if I wasn’t an absurdist at a universal atheistic level, it’d be hard to be a communist without being an absurdist at the societal level Camus is writing at. Trench warfare and line go up and electoralism are absurd things which drive you crazy enough to believe in them if you can’t admit how arbitrary and meaningless they are. When you break from that idealism, Camus has the right confrontational framework for what comes next.
Shits always been like this. Well, maybe not exactly like this, but this level of fucked or worse. There was just a brief blip after WWII when things were relatively stable, and now that its ending things feel a little out of control.
There is bugs
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, AKA “Might as well try my best in case I’m wrong and we manage to pull it off”.
— Ooh, yeah, baby! This right here is gonna make the last three days worth it. A fat syringe full of clear, medical-grade, Federally-backed estrogen. Aqueous estradiol valerate, to be precise.
— What happens when I inject myself with estrogen?
— Oh, no. No, no, no. Don’t tell me you forgot what estrogen does. Estrogen. Remember? Uh…anticistamines? Feminephrine?
[Hard: Success] — You haven’t forgotten. Generally speaking, patients undergoing hormone replacement treatments will experience a variety of physiological and mental changes. Drier skin, growth of breast tissue, weight redistribution, decrease of body hair growth, shifts in facial fat and musculature. Emotional changes vary wildly between individuals, but are often reported to be “intense”.
— Bzzt. Wrong. Estrogen is like junk, baby. A calm, soothing, smooth-like-butter body high. A referral letter from two medical professionals and a couple of shed tears in a therapist’s chair are the only things keeping every sucker on the street from turning into an E-junkie. Getting it is hard; stopping after you’ve had your first sweet shot is even harder. This is serious shit. And now it’s all yours. Shoot it up!
originally by @[email protected]