It’s very important to understand that the people we are currently giving power want us to feel doomed, hopeless, powerless, disassociated, confused, angry, hateful, and disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The people wielding power over us want to dominate every aspect of the human experience by putting us all into bubbles.
They want us all to be divided in a manner similar to how language once divided us in the past…and they have a litany of tools and strategies to bring this about — e.g. with AI, social media, algorithms that dictate what we see, partisan media, anti-science denialism, the use of religion and spirituality as a vehicle to manipulate broad groups of people, and so forth.
The people in power aren’t truly winning, but they are convinced they will survive society collapsing unscathed and firmly in power. Don’t let them believe that they have already won and give them reasons to rest easy with your defeat and doomerism (or more accurately; your passivity and subservience).
Don’t believe everything you think
I know things seem grim right now, but don’t worry, they’re about to get so much worse. You will look back at today and think to yourself “remember how innocent we were back then?”
Had me in the first half.
The way I see it, no matter how bad things are, it won’t distract me from the fact that every good thing matters. If not for me, if not for other people, then people who will come after. I’m only one person, but at least trying to do my part and being grateful for the things I have and receive, be it friends, a bed, food, a roof, a fun moment. And I can still accept the terrible state of so many things also.
Or in the words of David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
This party sucks… but I seem to keep visiting again and again.
It’s better today than the wast majority of history, so you got that going for ya
I mean, yeah, but the current trajectory is down, not up.
Yeah, because everything was fine and everyone got soft and complacent.
Like it or not, we’re coming to the end of that, we’ve not even scratched the surface of how bad it’s actually going to get. The people and communities that smarten up will (sometimes) survive, and more and more, the ones that do not will not.
That’s because soft times build hard men, but hard men times will soft build hard time soft men. We just need to stay strong ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽
Did you stroke out mate, or did I?
I read it as medley.
I’m not eating hard-boiled men…
This is why people have stopped having kids
FR like I want my potential kids to grow up in a dystopian capitalist surveillance state rigged by a revolving door of delusional cartoon villian-esque dipshits with too much money on a dying planet full of disasters that are only going to get worse, along with ever evolving AI warping reality and truth bit by bit as we speak??? Like, no thanks. I’ll save them the trouble. :l Eh, maybe if you don’t live somewhere where people think Noah’s Ark is unassailable fact, you might have the luxury before it’s too late.
Only sometimes?
Remind yourself that that belief is based on your very limited experience of history. Things get worse and better over the course of time. Your only true grief may be that you may not live to see the tide change. But that’s very different from thinking all is doomed.
I recommend some John Green and Hang Green and vlogbrother videos. Remember the news reports on the catastrophic now… Not the slow incremental progress required to improve the world. But good things are still happening and good people are still working to make those good things happen.
Chances are (forgive me if I’m wrong as this obviously doesn’t apply to every person) you are fed, warm, and sheltered. You can reach out to friends and family across town or across continents and connect in real time. As much as everything FEELS like the world is going to end… ignore what you need to in order to be your best self. Help where you can, give money to the things you care about when you can, and remember that humanity has done some really cool things.
Don’t let the hopium commenters and the ‘it was worse a thousand years ago’ crowd gaslight you. Your intuition is correct, give yourself credit. You are correct: nothing will change for the better. Fragile ecosystems on the verge of collapse, climate catastrophes, rampant fleecing of the population via unchecked corporate greed, genocides, starvation, crumbling infrastructure, and most alarming -humanity turning inwards, rejecting science, embracing fascism across the globe, and unable to grasp the ramifications and importance of the plight of the world.
You are fully justified in feeling hopeless. Hopium is humanity’s reaction to the hopelessness (religion isn’t cutting it anymore).
Your best bet is to just make peace with it. Find happiness in the collapse. Think about the nice new shiny transparency effects in iOS 26, or the sale Target is having on imported plastic lawn ornaments.
You are a witness to the end of it all. And that’s a special place in history; a front row seat if you will.
Consider who this mentality benefits most. Things are certainly going to get very awful, but as they get worse there will come a time when those most responsible are held accountable, one way or another. The sooner this occurs the more people are likely to survive. Yes, a vast many, maybe even most of us could perish, but retreating into doomerism, choosing to do nothing, means prolonging the worlds destitution by postponing change. Humans, as a collective, are not a species that likes to give up, the sooner we do something the more lives we save, even if it is just a few. I will not blame you for forsaking the collective in order to preserve the individual but pushing that mentality to others could do real harm. The only people who benefit from this choice are those responsible for our doom.
Thank you for pushing back here.
There has never been a time in history that wasn’t “the worst time ever”, and those problems are long forgotten.
From my parents time: a scary unstoppable new killer virus called HIV, cold war and nuclear arms race, rising violent crime, the disappearing ozone layer, etc, etc.
Not underplaying anyone’s difficulties now…life is certainly hard for a lot of people. But there’s reason to be optimistic. These problems will pass, and then there will be whole whole load of really shit new existential problems…and the cycle will continue.
It could be worse.
You could have lived through the 80’s and 90’s when we were on the verge of global thermonuclear war, but at least the music was great. Imagine living through that and now having to deal with this shitty dystopia with even shittier music…
I lived through the 90s and there was a distinct lack of fear about nuclear war. It felt more like America doing a victory lap after the USSR fell.
It was very much something my generation feared. It permeated pop culture in the 70’s and 80’s
70s and 80s yes. Not so much the 90s. Those were the salad years. Glasnost, the end of the cold war, the Internet… Everything was looking so positive. Hell, even the music was happier (although that might be selection bias).
The 70s and 80s were terrifying by comparison.
Yeah, totally. But my first memory of the Cold War was watching my mom cry while people hit a wall with hammers on TV
Even worse: AI generated slop
Maybe I was just too young, but I never got the impression that a thermonuclear war was around the corner.
To quote an absolute idiot who would mistakenly say smth wise (Quayle), ‘The future will be better tomorrow’.
Look at all we have done to make this world. We live in a better world than ever before
Learn to hate the people who have caused it - namely, everyone. Take more joy in their suffering than your own. Dissociate from your own body and discover the joys of being a sadistic witness to the downfall of man.
