#doomerism

Perhaps it's just me. But the geopolitical insanity that I see and learn from my peers all over the world, doesn't feel like the end. No, it... it feels like change. The last horrible and panicked gasps of the dying old, because it refuses to accept that it is not sustainable anymore, and the world is moving towards the better, through protests and unity and human goodness. I've seen this before - in stories from the older generation, and in history books.

But I also feel terribly guilty whenever I start thinking like that, for some odd reason? I feel guilty whenever I try and rationalize that despite it all, the world will continue existing, and even in the worst case scenario (which we already have avoided), there would be forests and oceans and species and biodiversity and ecosystems and people and cities and countries to see and love, because after all, nature is resilient and adaptable - just like our species are.

I feel guilty for feeling this cautious curiosity about what the future might hold for us, the bad and the good. Because I feel like I am obligated to be grieving and panicking and angry, like many people are - but that's just... so tiring.

Hi Anon,

This is going to be a long one because I think your ask gets at something difficult that I have a lot of thoughts about.

Your phrase “cautious curiosity” made me think of psychology researcher Jamil Zaki’s idea of “hopeful skepticism”. Which is not assuming that everything will inevitably get better, but open to the possibility that it could and curious to see the paths it might take to get us there.

Our society tends to view a cynical outlook as more intelligent or even more moral, but research shows that a cynical outlook actually makes people worse at predicting outcomes, worse at cognitive and problem-solving tasks, less likely to vote or protest, and even measurably harms their physical and mental wellbeing.

I think the guilt you describe is likely coming from the feeling that while we have been significantly improving conditions for humanity on this Earth and will likely continue to do so in the long run, in the present there are many real humans suffering--it can be hard and uncomfortable to hold these two truths together.

Even if this last dying breath is temporary and brief, it is destroying real people’s lives and many more live in fear that they will be next. The fact that child mortality has absolutely plummeted even just in my own lifetime is both a miracle of humanity and means little to the parent who has lost their child to a preventable death. To quote the philosopher Max Roser, “The world is much better; the world is still awful; the world can be much better.”.

You don't need to feel guilty for having hope for the future. Carrying feelings like hopelessness, grief, and fear all the time is entirely valid, but like you said it is also exhausting—and there is nothing inherently moral about emotionally suffering particularly if it’s harming your ability to live your life or take positive action.  

You are right that we are still making progress in the correct direction in many ways. You are right that history is rife with examples of forward momentum provoking a reactionary backtracking but that the forward momentum usually ultimately prevails.

The key here, is to understand that the future path you describe is possible—even likely more probable than a lot of people think—but it is not inevitable. We still have to take action to make it happen. The arc of history bends towards progress only because so many millions of mostly unnamed unknown people have put the work in to bend it in big and little ways.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes from Rebecca Solnit: “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

Reminding others that progress is still happening and that there is hope for a brighter future is important work in getting members of your community to pick up their own axe and make that future happen. Hope in dark times is not just ok or reasonable--it is a precious, vital tool.

i understand the notion to doomer post, i get that. unfortunately, those posts would only stop everyone else from continuing to fighting for our rights. i get that feeling completely, i do. however, and i can keep on saying this, but we're still in this, you guys!

we need to be louder. maybe change up our strategy a bit, but still, our voices were heard. a lot more people were opposing kosa today! think about that.

hopefully, more people will eventually come to that realization that we still have a chance. this wasn't considered a "hands all on deck" situation for no reason.

we did what we could, and we were successful in some way. not fully, but we got somewhere. we just need to continue that.

so until then, never stop fighting. i'll inform y'all about any further developments about kosa. for now, the chat control repeal thing will be getting started soon enough. unfortunately, i don't have enough information about it, so i'll link the discord server about stopping chat control here. if anyone's in the eu, and if you care about your anonymity, i would recommend checking it out, and fighting for your rights as well. until then, i'll head on out.

thank you for fighting this, as well as any nice comments you all gave me. hopefully, everything today had gone a bit better than before. that's all i'll say.

this post was mainly about the doomer posts going around, but hopefully my point still stands.

Not A Good Day

“Are you done?”

Max glares up at GP standing in his driver's room door. “What?”

“Are you done snapping at everyone?”

“No.”

GP sighs, feeling more tired than disappointed, “At least you're honest about it.”

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.

People will recommend — at this point even urge me given how bad things have gotten — to take part in left-wing civic engagement of some kind. Alright, that's great and all, but I have a genuine, serious question that I'd like for someone to answer.

What's the point of taking part in left-wing civic engagement to achieve left-wing social change if there is no guarantee/certainty that (a) it will even be achieved or (b) the achievement will even last forever, as it can very easily be weakened, even undone?

I'm not spending any amount of time taking part in these activities to accomplish this goal, only for options A or B to occur. If options A or B were to occur, then any and all efforts having been done to accomplish this goal would be for nothing, right? For me to take part in these efforts, there needs to be a total guarantee/total certainty that left-wing social change will be achieved in the country — preferably in our fucking lifetimes and not in the far distant future — and that said accomplishment will never be weakened or undone by anyone, the Right and/or otherwise. That guarantee/certainty needs to based not on how you feel but based on actual facts, the reality of the situation. And based on the reality of this whole ordeal, it doesn't even seem to really matter if there's an increasing number of people (leftists and otherwise) in the country opposing Trump, his administration, and/or the Right, in general. As long as the Right, including other people (individuals and groups) whose interests align with the Right's interests (specifically capitalists, rich ones and otherwise) continue to have more power and influence than the Left does — which I believe they forever will because of the extreme level of power and influence they have in seemingly everything — then left-wing social change will be next to impossible to accomplish in this country.

And they won't do jackshit or take my words because they believe we're all cooked no matter what we do and are encouraging others to give up to, could they at least try to do something?

Literally in one video, these people refused to take my advice and switch over from Google to another browser after the AI announcement, like what the hell, it's not that hard!