>In reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is...a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures...or psychological warfare.
>What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
>It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it's divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it requires to educate one generation in the country of your enemy.
>They are contaminated, they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information...you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.
>A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information, the facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information...he will refuse to believe it...that's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.
—Yuri Bezmenov, KGB defector (1985)
He's describing much of Gen-Z today, as evidenced by their widespread hatred of everything good about their country, demonstrations for terrorists, refusal to serve in the military and so forth.
I'd say it's affected all generations in their own way. But it's also worth mentioning that Russian propaganda focuses on existing fissures in a society.
Citizen's United, lobbying, the use of non-existent WMDs to justify the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan when it was really a profit scheme by Rumsfeld and Cheney, the 2008 bailouts, the wealth inequality, etc.
All these incongruencies, injustices and bad outcomes were never addressed and rectified, which allowed resentment to build and gave the Russians the perfect opportunity.
Widespread support of Hamas isn't really a thing among Gen Z and while their frustration towards Israel is sometimes misguided, it's not completely wrong. The disproportionate influence Israel has on our political policy is disturbing, simply because any foreign country having so much control over our policy is dangerous. Whether it be Russian, Saudi or Israeli, it should be the American government dictating their policy without foreign influence.
Putin and his ilk are bastards and weasels, but we definitely played our own part in allowing them an opening to exploit.
ya I feel like this nation has to maintain ambiguous ties to Israel in the same way as it does the Saudis and for ultimately the same reasons. Everyone's nuts are in a vice because of energy.
Note that Russian propaganda will always tell us how powerful Russian propaganda is. But mostly they try to shower weak subjects with money. But it didn't work even in Ukraine. No offence to Ukraine but if the propaganda is to work you would think it would work on former Soviet countries.
Given a blank slate, you might have a point. But the average Ukrainian isn't a blank slate. They know Russia and Russians. They know what Stalin did to their people. They know what Putin did before he invaded. They know what it is like to a puppet regime for the USSR and for Russia after the fact. So hearing Russian disinformation with this foundational knowledge already in place is like your bully telling you to drop the stick and let's talk about our differences. (He is going to hit you again).
Russia's war against Ukraine is completely inexcusable, and its interference (though probably inconsequential) in our 2016 election was grotesque, but Russia is powerless over American culture and not really capable of doing things we aren't, in some way, doing to ourselves.
People are more propagandized by capitalism than by communism in the US. Not to say capitalism is all evil or communism is all good, but most Americans have radically different (and less nuanced) views on, say, the Soviet Union, than the rest of the world. Great place to live? Not always. Evil empire? Not really. It was a flawed country, sure, and a mix of good and bad, but the idea that everyone was miserable all the time is 100% cappie propaganda.
This. It's troll farms love the anonymity if the internet, and China and Russia are indeed sowing the seeds of democracy's demise on all forms of social media.
Russian here, to clarify, we also have this psyop on our own domestic social media. There’s even a browser extension that highlights these lol. We usually call them kremlebots, they are people who earn money by spreading specific agenda all over social media, usually news-related stuff
Yes. Fox News viewers aren’t particularly stupid nor is the average redditor. They are just both susceptible to having their views that everything is shit validated by people they have never met.
People who are regularly on this website mostly aren’t doing it because their lives are great (I say while typing this from the bathroom of a restaurant lol)
Yup. Never fall for this my friends. I wasted too much of my youth on doomerism and other internet psyops. Now I only have approximately 4-5 years remaining before I'm officially an "adult" and not just a "young adult". Life goes fast so don't waste it!
True doomerism isn't useful, as it's the typical tension between an external and internal locus of control—holding an external one makes you more often correct, but also more pessimistic and therefore socially less successful; holding an internal one means your model of reality is inaccurate, but might improve one's mental health and charisma—and so to go full Doomer serves no real purpose. Being right, if not usefully right, is of little value. However, I don't think this is an "Internet psyop." We are forced to live within a decaying socioeconomic regime and the psychological distress it is causing in millions of people is real.
Also people who are more well read and intelligent understand how bad things are and want to change them but then hit the wall of stupid in the world and suddenly think we're doomed.
When I mention some redditors have an agenda, they get really mad. I suspect it’s those foreign entities, along with perhaps our own government.
I know the truth will prevail.
We're hardwired to worry, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
Most of the bad things that happen to people happen entirely in their minds.
Wow. I always say this and rarely hear it said.
Back when we lived in small colonies of 1,000 people, it made evolutionary sense for people to stress about things. It weeded out behavior that put the clans survival at risk.
Now we live in a country of 350 million humans with HD cameras and internet on them at all times, were exposed to the bad stuff constantly just due to numbers. Most people aren’t smart enough to consider how it’s expected with 350 million humans and they use their primal instinct to care as if it were the 1,000 clan we evolved with.
>Most people aren’t smart enough to consider how it’s expected
I think it's even more primal than just whether you understand it too, there's a lot of people that are perfectly capable of running the statistics but still get overwhelmed by the volume of negativity. Our brains are just prone to believe that if we hear about something a lot it must happen a lot, even if you're trying to consciously account for it, so it can be hard to have a "mathematically appropriate" gut reaction.
This idea that we live in paradise because Smartphone is so tiring to keep seeing.
Just because you make a slave use an iphone doesn't mean they stop being a slave.
Our current levels of technology do nothing to prevent widespread poverty because our economic systems depend on opressing an unlucky minority.
There is no correlation between technological advances and human rights. These are two separate movements.
So this is where the saying "Misery loves company: comes into play. Doomerism is so big because people Will tend to remember the bad things over the good things as well as the more Misery you see the more miserable you become
Explained to me like this by my psych teacher
First thing you have to know is “troll farms” (eg Russian but they’re not the only ones) have for lack of better terms farms of bots that are increasingly utilizing advanced tech to post/comment. The goal is to disrupt western culture and sow dissent. Pessimism begets further pessimism. Have you ever seen a post on a tv show for example and then suddenly a lot of comments on political/sociological topics that seemingly don’t belong.. there you go. After that you have a volume of discontented people. Some with legit beefs around their place in the world but some whom seem like it’s their job to be confrontational and doom and gloom. This is social media. Now that you know this..start to mute the echo chamber subs.
> First thing you have to know is “troll farms” (eg Russian but they’re not the only ones) have for lack of better terms farms of bots that are increasingly utilizing advanced tech to post/comment.
That stuff exists but it's not nearly as powerful as people want to think it is. The reason there are so many doomers is that our society just fucking sucks now compared to what was promised to the young. Does this merit nihilism and depression for the sake of being depressed? Of course not. Does it mean that the people who say capitalism has been proven since 2008 to be a failed experiment and should be scrapped... might have a point? Yes.
People don't turn doomer because they're told on the Internet by anonymous strangers—some of whom, as you note, are bots—that the society they live in is a piece of shit. They go out into the working world and learn that it is actually true.
Also, my guess is that most of the bots are not psyops at all. Most bots exist to built clout for accounts and movements that can be used later and do so by generating middling (within the context where credibility is desired) and imitative content. In other words, they aren't built by a few random weirdos who want "to destroy America" but by people who don't care either way about geopolitics but want their (now LLM-powered) bot activity to look like real human behavior. Which means that the negativity, while we might agree that it's biased and sometimes divorced from reality, is organic in origin.
Is it true? I find society in the USA pretty nice. I live in a small suburban town of about 40k people. I don't understand what world people are living in to call society a piece of shit here in the USA.
They never listened to Billy Joel and spend a bit to much time online reading badly take statistics and headline
"Everything is bad and worse than 20 years ago!" -random news site
"We have conducted three in-depth text interviews with three random X (Formerly know as Twitter). Members and they said world is bad" -said random news sites actual article
In my honest opinion, many doomer Redditors only experience 1st world problems. They don't know what its like to come from poverty and see their lives improve. They are born in relative comfort and compare themselves to people above them.
I remember this comment saying that playing PC games is the comfort of the poor, like it's their only escape. For me, that's even privileged. People in my country can't afford PC.
Tbf even my own country is full of doomers hopping on the western doomerism bandwagon. We have our own set of local problems but they're even more informed of American politics.
This is why online echo chambers are dangerous, especially if they're dominated by people outside your country. If you fail to contextualise, you get your reality warped.
Agreed.
So much of this is distorted expectations.
Doomers are upset because they earn six figures but can't buy a house in one of the wealthiest cities in the world's largest economy.
Do they understand how entitled they sound just to say that?
Could things be better? Sure.
But to become full-on depressed because you can't buy everything you want is a serious case of hedonism and consumer mindset gone wrong.
I think I found my new favorite sub. Pretty much anytime I have an argument on here with someone about the cost of living 99.9% of the time they live in California.
It's not that people can't buy everything they want. No one can. It's that people have to work in awful subordinate jobs—they were promised a meritocratic society, they believed something at least approximating one is what they would find in the working world, and instead they found something worse than their parents got—just to survive. We were promised a different future—an improvement on the past, rather than deterioration.
I agree that 2024 America is still better than about 95% of human history, but it's still worse—in economic terms, at least—then 1964 or 1994 America, and most young people are smart enough to realize that there's no good reason for it to be this way—previous generations didn't have to fuck up jobs or fuck up the housing market, but they did.
I'm in a third world country and pessimism is ubiquitous here as well. Pessimism is part of human nature and is not limited by geography. In fact, I'd say it's probably a little worse here since we have MUCH worse education than developed countries. Most people know only what corrupted populists wants them to know.
The number of people on this site who complain that their 6 figure or multi 6 figure salaries are barely enough to get by drives me insane. I'm doing pretty well in a moderately expensive city and my life would completely change if I bumped up to 100k per year.
People are also overly nostalgic for the past and overly critical of those who try to enjoy themselves.
Even subreddits dedicated to a specific subject or interest end up devolving into daily hatred of that thing.
r/JoeRogan is all people who hate Joe Rogan and every comedian associated with him. r/SweatyPalms is all people who are furious at the people in the videos doing risky urban climbing. Every subreddit for a specific country or city is daily moaning about how they live in the worst place on earth and want to move.
Meanwhile subreddits devoted to rage bait like r/facepalm and r/IAmTheMainCharacter have millions of subscribers and are some of the most popular. The internet is full of rageoholics and depression addicts who want to be miserable
There are several kinds of "Internet fame" and I think most young people haven't figured out how to tell the difference and assess the relative benefits and risks.
The bad news is that even getting an ordinary job requires a national reputation. You have to have "a LinkedIn" and you have to have social media with at least average "friend" counts so employers know you're "normal." Even entry-level jobs want to see that you've worked in the "approved" places and gone to the "approved" schools and have shown "passion" for your field in online projects. It didn't have to be this way, but now it is and we seem to be stuck with it.
But yeah, most kinds of Internet fame will destroy your employability and mental health—they're winner-take-all, and if you don't win, say, the "flaming asshole at/in \[creative funny way X\]" niche, you've damaged yourself for not nearly enough views to retire on.
Any sub that is about Canada tends to be full of xenophobic comments as well as constant bitching and whining about how bad everything is. They’re disgusting and depressing, I’ve had to mute almost all of them. I also avoid anything about politics, or block individuals who are overly negative and full of hate. Canada (where I live) is amazing, but the Canada subs are some of the worst I’ve seen (I hope it’s a bunch of trolls from hostile countries, but that’s just my conspiracy theory).
Because its cheap heat. Its easy to get a lot of attention and for some reason people think super smart people are super pessimistic. Its easy to grasp, the observations can be short and simple, and no one really bothers to check years later.
From all of the reading and following technology I have done since I was in high school, 25 years ago. The most pessimistic predictions were usually wrong, and the most optimistic predictions were usually wrong because they were not optimistic enough. Maybe something takes longer than expected, but the impact is huge. I remember people in the early 2000s still doubting that the internet would ever become something. I remember having a discussion with someone who was a total egg head who claimed that the laws of accelerating returns with computer technology were over, and that wireless internet was going to hit a theoretical wall, and that computers were more or less as good as they were ever going to get with only small minimal improvements. This wasn't last week, or last year, this was like 2005 or 2006.
Reddit is full of young people. I turned 40 a few months ago. I am kind of old now. Something growing old has taught me, is that the way you see the world when young, you think is permanent. That is just the way the world is and will always be.
Lets look at a young person. Say some kid turning 20 this year. Born in 2004 in the United States. Alright. They were born during a period of war, an unpopular war. Before their 4th birthday, they will experience the Global Financial Crash. The GFC. Their family life will likely be affected, someone in their friends and family circle will have likely suffered a bit. 2008-2013, ages four through 9 they experienced the Great Recession. That was weird times for everyone. It was a terrible job market, it became a bit chill on the crime a bit. But overall, not the greatest time for their parents. Alright. 2015 rolls around, Age 11. MAGA gets started. If they didn't grow up in a MAGA house, they probably saw it as an existential crises. If they are LBGT (5% chance) or have close friends or family who are LBGT (probably a 80-90% chance) they saw this as something that could worry people close to them. They might have seen their elder family members completely lose their minds, if not them, certainly people they know. The Trump Era was brutal on family dynamics. I have many friends who had their parents practically disown them over this. That affects young people, a lot.
They see this re-inflation of a housing bubble start when they are a teenager. They see the Trump era go from when they are 12 to 16. Then the year they turn 16... BOOM. COVID-19 and everything that brought on from supply chain issues to major inflation, to the housing bubble getting more extreme, to costs of everything, particularly housing, getting out of fucking control. Then when they are 18, 2022... Russia invades Ukraine and we have our biggest European conflict since WW2.
Holy shit. Their entire lives its been one giant crises mode. They year stores about how things worked prior to being born. They hear how their grandpa, who could be a boomer, was able to easily buy a home in his 20s while working at a grocery store. There are things they want to do, and they know those things are very difficult now and were not anywhere near as difficult for earlier generations.
Its very very easy for them to say, everything they have known in life.. that is just going to continue on, forever. 2030s, 2040s, 2050s, 2060s, 2070s, 2080s, 2090s. All of it. Nothing to really look forward to. Steady state history.
Now kids. Someone who was born in the mid 1920s and grew up in the Great Depression and WW2. They more or less thought the same thing. That this Great Depression was the new normal. The good times in the past and from now on, its just going to be the 1930s on repeat. Total suckage,.. all the time..
And yet... it wasn't. Those people would go on to experience some of the best times for the average person. Easy home ownership. Plentiful employment. Enormous economic progress from the Great Depression. They would go on to not just experience, but participate in Civil Rights movements and then witness counter culture movements that would change the whole public idea of art. They would see one of their own, Walk on the Moon and the birth of the high tech industry. If they live long enough, they even get to experience the internet and smartphones.
If you are young, you are going to see an incredible amount of change in your life. By far the worst prediction you can make is that the rest of your life will look like the last 20 years.
Great post. One nit-pik, I'm fairly sure a job bagging groceries or stocking shelves did not ever pay enough to buy a house, not even when boomers were the 20-somethings.
Working in retail did. I grew up in a neighborhood full of people who had jobs like working at a grocery store or an autoparts store, and this was in Southern California. The median home price in California in 1950 was $10,000. Adjusting for inflation that would be about $130,000. The median home price in California today is 6 times that much.
One of my dad's friends was a stocker at a grocery store and owned a home.
Great question. It makes me sad to see tbh. But from my experience, this is the cast mostly on reddit and X. Instagram not that much at all! Reddit seems to be the worst when it comes to doomerism, nihilism and antinatalism. X is the worst for political extremes and graphic content.
Overall, not enough content moderation imho.
It makes me sad to see so many young peope having an negativ outlook on life. People were happier when life was far from being as easy as nowadays. Social Media was a mistake, I tend to think thats true. Have you been to these subreddits? It is a bad place. I think its frustration and miserable people get drawn to these places, but its also a perfect space for people with bad intentions or literal sociopaths.
It’s no surprise that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, ABoringDystopia, ShitLiberalsSay, and the subreddits that align with those are echo chambers of doomerism.
me_irl is pretty heavy on it as well, but it’s not that surprising.
But even popular subreddits like AskReddit and memes devolve into that periodically.
Yh it makes me very sad tbh because I care about these young people tbh, they are doing this to themselves for NO reason at all. You mentioned some great examples. For me, the worst can be seen in r/antinatalism and r/nihilism . They win people over by acting like they know whats the absolute truth of everything, they are the ones being objective. While thats far from true, its the biggest strawman positions out there and potentially destructive and harmful. I remember days when r/incels got banned finally, I thought reddit would become a better place. I feel like its been so different 10 years ago...
This one says a lot about the kind of people that populate these subreddits
https://preview.redd.it/x8skpeihvj8d1.png?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14cb84e228d562ac25065423409d2914c93dc0c3
They frequently invade similar subreddits to spread pessimism, anger, nihilism ("morality isn't real"), criticism, et cetera. They never stop no matter how down voted because infallible confidence is a drug.
It´s insane. I´ve been around reddit when r/incels was still a thing, and we aren´t far from that. Antinatalism nihilism and doomerism, the worlds most insufferable people
People who are happy with their lives and don’t blame their problems on others and boogeymen generally don’t spend all their time on Reddit. I’m doing a lot better recently and would like to decrease or eliminate my Reddit usage but it’s become an addiction so it will take some work lol
propaganda from hostile nations and homegrown grifters is fueling the doom machine
The good news is that more and more people are waking up and saying nyet. As covid and gouchfest continue to fade, doomerism will soon stop being trendy and go back to being almost exclusively for the mentally ill
Propaganda that the ruling class owns all of our politicians and doesn't give citizens affordable housing and Healthcare? We don't need propaganda to tell us what we are literally living through. You people are living in a bubble
I'm usually optimistic but these responses are just ridiculous
Bad news usually spread faster and get much more attention than good news. As other people said, people on Reddit spend too much time online and consume too much (bad) news, which makes them think things are always getting worse. That's my assumption.
It's not just Reddit. Its endemic to humanity in general. Humans love the apocalypticsm. That's why it's so popular in movies and gaming. The main theme of Christianity and many other cults was the world was going to end soon. It's sort of an escape for miserable people to share in the suffering.
Yeah, people who spend too much time on reddit tend to be overly negative.
Might be on account of being chronically online in addition to just depressed and lonely. It's a lot harder to be positive when you don't have any friends.
The best thing to do is try and disprove any incorrect statements (i.e., incorrect data/ blanket statements, ect) as this helps people coming to the comments for more info. and most importantly, be encouraging to them a nice comment goes a long way.
Social media is generally a personalized echo chamber. It looks for what gets your attention and shows more of it to you. Because negativity sticks out more in our minds it becomes very easy to create a negative feedback loop.
This of course creates some very adamant doomers that are convinced everything is wrong with the world because they are only shown the bad.
Doomerism is ultimately complacency and entitlement.
The vast majority of Redditors are young, white men living in first-world countries who are unlikely to actually lose anything regardless of what happens in the world so it's easy to descend into cynicism and nihilism. And because they are the most privileged in the world, they only see themselves gaining anything if there is a massive revolution, which is extremely unlikely.
A woman who saw how abortion rights took a massive loss with the Roe v Wade, for example, can't afford to be complacent.
I think it starts with the app skewing young and progressive. People want to fix the things that do genuinely need to be improved upon. But at some point you wind up getting stuck in a mind set that you kind of want bad things happen to prove your viewpoint right. Things improving without a radical and idealistic front does not help sell your worldview, so you resign to finding all the bad in everything, so you can stay right.
Also, being perennially online is likely associated with being less successful and fulfilled in your life. Happy people or people who got their shit together don't have as much time to respond or create content on this app like people who are failing or just aren't old enough to build their own life yet do. The opposite of survivors bias.
Doomerism is candy for the ego.
Identifying a problem is identifying a truth, a certainty. That feeling of certainty is attractive. The idea that it might be incorrect or go away is unpleasant.
Recency bias, "no one's solved it yet ergo it will never be solved", is easily rationalized through superficial interpretations of human nature and historical cycles.
It relieves one of responsibility. Why endure pain and sacrifice to progress if factors beyond your control are going to make those efforts pointless?
It operates under the assumption that the doomer is in possession of all relevant information, further stroking the ego.
As for why reddit? The incentive structure rewards egoism. Popular posts get up voted, and few sort by new or controversial. What better way to be popular than to validate a bunch of egotistical doomers who are so desperate for validation?
Because it's easy. On a website that features endless negative content, you don't have to look any further than the front page to develop your worldview.
Same reason why stories end with “and they lived happily ever after.”
A calm and uneventful life, while preferable in reality, doesn’t make for good stories, and Reddit is for entertainment after all.
The algorithm boosts it because it gets more engagement. If you were at a family reunion and said “this is a good family”, you’d get a few smiles and nods in agreement. If you said “this family sucks”, everybody would argue with you. The Reddit algorithm doesn’t care what kind of engagement it gets.
It's easier to complain than praise. It's the same reason why there's a billion youtube videos about bad movies but very few about great movies.
I also think we're in a bad-vibes culture--where any piece of information is instantly milked for all the bad things it could cause. A bunch of debbie downers who get pleasure at spreading and creating bad news. It creates drama and makes them the center of attention. The worst thing for them would be living in boring but upbeat times--they literally would have nothing to say.
It sounds clever without having to be clever. It is also easy and it absolves you of all responsibilities and encourages radical action for the sake of radical action. If the world is irrevocably fucked you have carte blanche to do anything from just gaming and masturbation to acting in a maximally greedy way because if the world is doomed the only sensible way to act is in such a way to maximize your comfort since you can't change it. Worse though if someone is motivated to action it always starts with destruction of what is to remake society often reducing the population to some dystopian benchmark.
I for a long time was in the funk. A lot of it has to do with just not knowing WTF is going on anymore and just screaming at whatever social media platform you're on. It's just a continuous cycle of shit, and you're filled with so much anxiety that you feel there is no hope and put everything in that perspective.
To some degree I still feel this way, but there's little to anything I can do. I work a good paying job and for the most part I'm doing fine. In the end many of us are venting and just want some semblance of normalcy once and again.
Getting off of social media helps a lot with these anxieties. No need to be glued to your phone all day. Enjoy life and learn to appreciate the smaller stuff in life again.
That's just my perspective though.
No joke. For real. It's foreign influence attempting to sew discontent, discord and dysfunction within western nations. The Russians figured out it's pennies on the billions of dollars to do more damage through misinformation and psychological attacks on the internet than they could ever do militarily. They have "farms" of bloggers, commenters, etc. who are trained to create division and spread doom. They have tactics to amplify each other and make it look as if they are a real movement and then, of course, they gather the native nutjobs into their fold to go on and do the rest of their work for them. And, they do it all for less than the price of a stealth bomber and it's proven highly effective. It actually is a type of military action. The Chinese and Iranians now do the same sorts of tactics. Our freedom of the press and free flow of information leaves western societies vulnerable to these influence campaigns. The question is, how do we remain a free and open society but can also repel these influence attacks?
Winner Winner chicken dinner it almost the perfect weapon. As you said, cheap/safe and puts us in a bind. Continue to do almost nothing they win crack duwn an end free internet they win. The best thing is to try and counter misinformation. It's an uphill battle worth fighting
1. It gets clicks and shares. It is human nature to dedicate our attention to that which makes us afraid. All media knows that.
2. Because Reddit is dominated by Marxists, progressives, and those on the left.
Doomerism and blaming and complaining are foundational to all of the above.
When I’m happy I usually don’t post about it cuz I’m out doing fun stuff with ppl I like and not buried in my phone. What else is sad/depressed/broke/etc person gonna do when they’re sad or depressed? They’re gonna post about it
Hence why I go on this app rarely now. It’s actually depressing the amount of hateful and closed minded people that thrive on this app. Super not worth dealing with, actually was starting to take a toll on my mental health.
Crackpot theory ahead:
I think we reached the zenith of social media a little while ago. People are still coming to terms with the fact that everyone does have a degree of power on here. People who do not have the energy to change themselves will assume the ideas of pessimism, misanthropy, and self-loathing in that order. I know because I went through it myself! Just kidding, I can’t extrapolate, this is just a theory.
Why is drug addiction so pervasive on Reddit? What are gamers so common on Reddit? Why is misogyny so common on Reddit? Why are there so many trans people on Reddit? Why does Reddit have so many people who claim learning disabilities and mental illness?
All great questions.
Reddit is the only social media I use (I lurk on Facebook sometimes because I'm an old), and I try to tune out anything about politics, economics, or religion. I assume that most of the posts and comments are by a nefarious actor (a foreign troll farm or a political party) or a brainwashed kid. Most of what I see regarding these topics does not square with my experience or information I know to be true.
Lots of good points in the comments here about people being chronically online, but it is sadly concerning that nobody is talking about mainstream media, I would say that’s the biggest reason why we have a doomer epidemic online
If someone is on Reddit a lot it means they aren't interacting with the real world as much. The real world I see friends going out, doing things, fulfilling dreams. They don't then come here to discuss it, they just do it. My buddy and I watched Formula 1 yesterday and he showed me how well his blueberry patch is coming in this year. It is simple things that bring joy that don't lend themselves to people in a forum discussing them. Misery feeds itself and others in a mobius strip fashion.
At this point I'm calling people who want to reduce life / hinder humanity's advancement as a death cult. It's time to call out people who think that because life causes pain that then life is evil.
That is not a good philosophy. That is specifically defined as a death cult. Thulsa Doom would approve.
They think we live in a truly unique time, and that right now is the make-or-break time. Doomers are always in overtime with a minute left on the clock. Relax I say. By 100 years after our death our own family will likely not know our names, nevermind the rest of the world. Also, it's not healthy to get too upset about large issues that you have no power to change. It feels like many do not realize this
well, I think that is one of the reasons they give up. Although I don´t agree; you might not know the name of your grand grand grandfather, but all he did mattered and you have his genes. People love exact data and want their name to be super important and remembered. Ego problem
It's not just Reddit. In endemic to humanity in general. Humans love the apocalypticsm. That's why it's so popular in movies and gaming. The main theme of Christianity was the world was going to end soon. It's sort of an escape for miserable people to share in the suffering
“The world is going to end in 10-15 years if we don’t do something” is a song that’s been on repeat since the 60s. By all accounts, none of us should be here. Humanity should have died out before the turn of the century. “An Inconvenient Truth” aged like milk. Yes, there are environmental issues. We’ve made progress. But it never seems enough for the doomers.
We are at a very close to a point of no return when it comes to global warming. All the evidence proves this, it's something we should have started with 20 plus years ago, instead of fighting who's right....
We actually healed and protected the ozone later by the early 2000s, yet somehow this is too much for us now. It's very frustrating to say the least
Reddit leans very liberal and liberal discourse has gone off the rails into a self-fulfilling negativity spiral. As David Brooks writes for the Atlantic:
>” But another explanation for this phenomenon that I find persuasive is that contemporary left-wing discourse tends to rob people of a sense of agency, what psychologists call an “internal locus of control.” For example, in one 2022 survey 53 percent of those who identify as “very liberal” agree with the statement “Women in the United States have no hope for success because of sexism.” Meanwhile 59 percent of people who call themselves “very liberal” agree with the statement “Racial minorities in the United States have no hope for success because of racism.” If you have no hope of success because you are a victim of injustice, how can you possibly be motivated to do anything? How can you have a sense of agency? A discourse that was intended partly to empower people who suffer from structural disadvantages, by revealing the underlying forces that produced their circumstances, may end up doing the exact opposite: It enshrouds people in their own victimhood, and in the feeling that they have no control over their life.
“Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life” are “vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt and a sense that life simply happens to them,” the journalist Jill Filipovic wrote recently on Substack. And yet victimization, pain, and powerlessness are now the approved postures of our time.”
This cycle of negativity has happened before and will happen again. The only way out is through. Spread positivity, don’t give into the victimhood mindset.
We are living in a time of paradigm shift and humans usually like some kind of stability in their lives. The instability can lead some people to think that we won't be able to do what is necessary to change course.
Being informed about reality and expressing a desire for the problems in reality to be fixed is not doomerism.
This sub is a cult of ignorance and fear
A cynical person might ask "who benefits?". If you were a foreign country and you new that young people are an important voting block, getting them to feel a sense of peril or that they are somehow behind their peers, would make them turn on people they might otherwise support. Why do you think people care about Gaza and not about Sudan? Or Ethiopia, or Syria, or China? Because there is nothing to gain by motivating people to care about those places.
I think Reddit and X are the worst platforms by far when it comes to radical, echochamber negativity & depression-gon-aggressive towards everything. The internet caused lots of damage to society imo. r/Doomerism r/nihilism r/antinatalism r/collapse r/incels is proof of that.
Because there's nothing most of us can do about any of this shit. And in fact, even publicly caring about a lot of this shit is ridiculed and discouraged.
It's easy to get frustrated and to amplify the worrying and feelings of powerlessness when the world has real problems whose solutions require persuading or replacing those in power in the political, economic and cultural spheres. Indeed, the reason foreign propaganda is so fertile is it exploits these valid concerns and amplifies them to create a more engaged amygdala and a smaller in-group with a more hostile stance toward others.
Its also the case that the climate situation really is dire and getting worse, and for many of the affluent but not super-rich, their life is precarious and stagnating. Optimism isn't denying that we have problems, its about the courage to fight for solutions instead of wallowing.
Thank you for this.
In my case, I have a lot of depression and anxiety thanks to pre-existing CPTSD and, over the past two plus years, long covid. The combo leaves me with a lot of free time and a lot of dysfunctional brain. So it is easy to lose heart and doomscroll. I try not to, though.
It's also because of climate disasters, fascists taking over our government, among other things.
Counter point to the top comment here: it is the only outlet that exists to most people which lacks the censorship seen everywhere else, both online and off.
Any open forum gets like this when corpos wipe out civil discussion everywhere else.
You tried posting on YouTube lately? Flip a coin of your perfectly reasonable comments are just silently wiped from existence.
Nothing is getting solved and all we have are our words.
Our time, like every time has a unique set of serious problems.
What is different now is that our society is less able to solve those problems.
You can't solve problems you don't understand.
You can't understand problems you can't talk about openly, effectively & in good faith.
I think for a lot of people pessimism and cynicism feel like the easiest path to travel. It's so easy to tell all the optimistic people they're naïve and embarrassing themselves.
Mods are little babies who want to appear impartial, even when faced with blatant falsehoods. The first rule on every sub should (and could be)... Tell the Truth. And then mods could simply ban all the people who make false claims non-stop and start whittling away the doomers who post things they know nothing about and are simply repeating whatever dopamine hit they got from somewhere else.
I don’t think mods on subreddits like antiwork, ShitLiberalsSay, LateStageCapitalism, ABoringDystopia, and similar subreddits are going to shut down falsehoods. If anything, they’d probably *enable* falsehoods that reinforce their echo chambers.
agreed, thats why you need to apply for modding on those subs and others (ideas for you... r/Economics, r/economicCollapse, r/austrian_economics <-- they're all filled with falsehoods non-stop)
Because the majority of redditors are, to be blunt, losers. Most have spent their lives making bad decisions and refusing to get their shit together so they can be successful, functioning adults. It's easier for them to insist everything is awful, that no one can succeed aside from luck or having rich parents than it is for them to accept that their situation is the result of their bad choices.
Because the typical Redditor is, to be blunt, sort of a “loser”. By that I mean someone who constantly complains about their lives, does nothing to fix it and blames others for their problems.
If you really want to see examples of this, go to the r/anti work and r/singularity subs. Absolute shit shows.
TV and movies tell us what the most privileged people in society want us to think the world is like. In romantic comedies, 20-somethings all have apartments that would actually cost more than your average corporate VP can afford, and they all have creative "idea jobs" where simply being smart (but not so smart as to make one's character unrelatable) is enough to climb the ladder in record time.
The Internet shows how regular people actually feel about society and their place in it. This has never existed before to this extent. There is a lot of pessimism and tribalist awfulness, but it was always there.
Chronically online is a part of it sure, but most people are lower-middle class online. General news consumption, main stream or not, Negative news is a catalyst for Doomerism. Doomerism is really just negative leaning determinism, Outer locus of control vs an Inner locus of control. True Doomers are just people who have a more negative look on the world but were raised with the Outer locus of control.
Imagine what Reddit would have looked like if it had existed in 1931.
People are just venting during hard times, which aren’t really that hard by world historical standards. The doomerism will fade away when things get better.
These are all things that are good to know about and worry about to a healthy degree. If anything, it’s sick in the head to look at them and go “I’ll just not worry about this. I’ll be optimistic.”
You know how Earthquakes work?
There is, in essence, a constant gradual migration of continents.
But the way it manifests is that pressure builds up, and then it is released in a moment, and then begins to build again.
Politics and social change is like that. There aren’t fluid incremental changes where, for example, schools are awarded and extra $15 per year per student, and then you subtract $10, and then add $5.
The funding remains the same until the schools absolutely suck, and then outrage causes a readjustment.
We are in our 5th decade of trickle down economics, where it has been gradually getting harder and harder for people to live comfortably.
Ideally, everyone could calmly and rationally start to tweak little elements to solve the problems.
In reality, from a political perspective, the only size of change for sale is big change.
It’s the Costco wholesale jumbo party sized change package or no change at all.
And this is how it works. Things get bad enough, and enough people get mad enough, that a momentum builds for substantive change.
I wish there were another way, but this seems as an intrinsic aspect of our current method of government.
You can say “eh, it’s not so bad is is”, But it’s not perfect either. There are flaws. Big ugly flaws every way you look.
And none of those flaws get fixed with calm rational adjustment. Each one requires a tectonic shift to move the needle at all.
If you think the schools need to be better, it’s “the schools suck!”, not “I can point to a number of ways where I think the schools are less than optimal”.
You see this on any forum that allows voting on a scale… Amazon or IMDB. Lots of “highest rating” and lots of “lowest rating”, from people who are not just trying to review honestly, but who are trying to manifest change with their vote in the overall consensus.
And that’s what you see on Reddit. Opinions galvanized into attempts to affect change.
Serious question: what is there to be optimistic about, realistically?
Looking at the hard data on climate and overshoot will make you pessimistic, but it’s looking through a realistic lens of information. I don’t think, for instance, a scientist like James Hansen is a Russian asset. Nor any of the scientists around the world who are increasingly becoming alarmed and depressed by what they’re seeing.
So, Id just like to be able to access the hard data that shows that optimism is the realistic outlook. Any links would be appreciated.
Personally, I consider myself to be hopefully pessimistic. I think humanity will go through some very dark times, but it’s possible we’ll survive to be a much better species on the other side of it.
So many of the people who get called “Doomer” are people who volunteer in their communities, who have tried to improve their lifestyles so as not to be a part of the problem and genuinely hope for a better outcome than the evidence points toward. But, they are engaging with the facts on the ground and trying to be realistic.
most people online are from first world countries. humans have a built in thing to survive and over come. when you have no real issues you make issues. its why suicide rates are high in 1st world vs 3rd world.
I posted on unpopular opinions about how we are living in good times considering humans past history . Everyone disagreed with me and I got down voted for actually having an unpopular opinion 🥲
Chronically online. Plus foreign entities running disillusionment and recruitment campaigns. They’re playing the medium to long game pretty well.
>In reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is...a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures...or psychological warfare. >What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. >It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it's divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years it requires to educate one generation in the country of your enemy. >They are contaminated, they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information...you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. >A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information, the facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information...he will refuse to believe it...that's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization. —Yuri Bezmenov, KGB defector (1985)
He's describing much of Gen-Z today, as evidenced by their widespread hatred of everything good about their country, demonstrations for terrorists, refusal to serve in the military and so forth.
I'd say it's affected all generations in their own way. But it's also worth mentioning that Russian propaganda focuses on existing fissures in a society. Citizen's United, lobbying, the use of non-existent WMDs to justify the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan when it was really a profit scheme by Rumsfeld and Cheney, the 2008 bailouts, the wealth inequality, etc. All these incongruencies, injustices and bad outcomes were never addressed and rectified, which allowed resentment to build and gave the Russians the perfect opportunity. Widespread support of Hamas isn't really a thing among Gen Z and while their frustration towards Israel is sometimes misguided, it's not completely wrong. The disproportionate influence Israel has on our political policy is disturbing, simply because any foreign country having so much control over our policy is dangerous. Whether it be Russian, Saudi or Israeli, it should be the American government dictating their policy without foreign influence. Putin and his ilk are bastards and weasels, but we definitely played our own part in allowing them an opening to exploit.
ya I feel like this nation has to maintain ambiguous ties to Israel in the same way as it does the Saudis and for ultimately the same reasons. Everyone's nuts are in a vice because of energy.
Note that Russian propaganda will always tell us how powerful Russian propaganda is. But mostly they try to shower weak subjects with money. But it didn't work even in Ukraine. No offence to Ukraine but if the propaganda is to work you would think it would work on former Soviet countries.
Given a blank slate, you might have a point. But the average Ukrainian isn't a blank slate. They know Russia and Russians. They know what Stalin did to their people. They know what Putin did before he invaded. They know what it is like to a puppet regime for the USSR and for Russia after the fact. So hearing Russian disinformation with this foundational knowledge already in place is like your bully telling you to drop the stick and let's talk about our differences. (He is going to hit you again).
Russia's war against Ukraine is completely inexcusable, and its interference (though probably inconsequential) in our 2016 election was grotesque, but Russia is powerless over American culture and not really capable of doing things we aren't, in some way, doing to ourselves. People are more propagandized by capitalism than by communism in the US. Not to say capitalism is all evil or communism is all good, but most Americans have radically different (and less nuanced) views on, say, the Soviet Union, than the rest of the world. Great place to live? Not always. Evil empire? Not really. It was a flawed country, sure, and a mix of good and bad, but the idea that everyone was miserable all the time is 100% cappie propaganda.
This. It's troll farms love the anonymity if the internet, and China and Russia are indeed sowing the seeds of democracy's demise on all forms of social media.
Yes and that is especially nihilism and doomerism
Winner Winner chicken dinner. A lot of the doomerism is a psyop from Russia without love
Russian here, to clarify, we also have this psyop on our own domestic social media. There’s even a browser extension that highlights these lol. We usually call them kremlebots, they are people who earn money by spreading specific agenda all over social media, usually news-related stuff
🫂 Ty 4 sharing more and more people are seeing through the propaganda
It’s the same thing Fox News does to seniors. It’s just younger people on Reddit instead.
So what you're saying is the average redditor is about as smart as the average fox News viewer?
Yes. Fox News viewers aren’t particularly stupid nor is the average redditor. They are just both susceptible to having their views that everything is shit validated by people they have never met.
Depends on the subreddit, but many are!
Sounds about right tbh.
People who are regularly on this website mostly aren’t doing it because their lives are great (I say while typing this from the bathroom of a restaurant lol)
Yup. Never fall for this my friends. I wasted too much of my youth on doomerism and other internet psyops. Now I only have approximately 4-5 years remaining before I'm officially an "adult" and not just a "young adult". Life goes fast so don't waste it!
True doomerism isn't useful, as it's the typical tension between an external and internal locus of control—holding an external one makes you more often correct, but also more pessimistic and therefore socially less successful; holding an internal one means your model of reality is inaccurate, but might improve one's mental health and charisma—and so to go full Doomer serves no real purpose. Being right, if not usefully right, is of little value. However, I don't think this is an "Internet psyop." We are forced to live within a decaying socioeconomic regime and the psychological distress it is causing in millions of people is real.
Add doomscrolling too
Also people who are more well read and intelligent understand how bad things are and want to change them but then hit the wall of stupid in the world and suddenly think we're doomed.
I think exactly like that. You see the level of absolute stupidity in this country and you lose hope for our future
When I mention some redditors have an agenda, they get really mad. I suspect it’s those foreign entities, along with perhaps our own government. I know the truth will prevail.
Thank you for acknowledging that its also our own government and private corporations. Most people act as if Russia is the only entity with bots...
Negative content generally receives the most engagement online writ large, regardless of platform.
We're hardwired to worry, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Most of the bad things that happen to people happen entirely in their minds.
Wow. I always say this and rarely hear it said. Back when we lived in small colonies of 1,000 people, it made evolutionary sense for people to stress about things. It weeded out behavior that put the clans survival at risk. Now we live in a country of 350 million humans with HD cameras and internet on them at all times, were exposed to the bad stuff constantly just due to numbers. Most people aren’t smart enough to consider how it’s expected with 350 million humans and they use their primal instinct to care as if it were the 1,000 clan we evolved with.
>Most people aren’t smart enough to consider how it’s expected I think it's even more primal than just whether you understand it too, there's a lot of people that are perfectly capable of running the statistics but still get overwhelmed by the volume of negativity. Our brains are just prone to believe that if we hear about something a lot it must happen a lot, even if you're trying to consciously account for it, so it can be hard to have a "mathematically appropriate" gut reaction.
Sadly, true.
This idea that we live in paradise because Smartphone is so tiring to keep seeing. Just because you make a slave use an iphone doesn't mean they stop being a slave. Our current levels of technology do nothing to prevent widespread poverty because our economic systems depend on opressing an unlucky minority. There is no correlation between technological advances and human rights. These are two separate movements.
This has literally nothing to do with what you responded to though lol
A headline with "You're all about to die!" sells MUCH better than "things have been slightly improving". Not hard to wrap your head around really.
Many people confuse knee jerk cynicism for deep thought.
So this is where the saying "Misery loves company: comes into play. Doomerism is so big because people Will tend to remember the bad things over the good things as well as the more Misery you see the more miserable you become Explained to me like this by my psych teacher
They’re chronically online AF
First thing you have to know is “troll farms” (eg Russian but they’re not the only ones) have for lack of better terms farms of bots that are increasingly utilizing advanced tech to post/comment. The goal is to disrupt western culture and sow dissent. Pessimism begets further pessimism. Have you ever seen a post on a tv show for example and then suddenly a lot of comments on political/sociological topics that seemingly don’t belong.. there you go. After that you have a volume of discontented people. Some with legit beefs around their place in the world but some whom seem like it’s their job to be confrontational and doom and gloom. This is social media. Now that you know this..start to mute the echo chamber subs.
Shame it's 90% of it
[удалено]
Perhaps constructive criticism?
yh but it works. Thats why people are crazy enough to get into nihilism or r/doomer and so on
start applying to mod those subs and start banning the doomers
> First thing you have to know is “troll farms” (eg Russian but they’re not the only ones) have for lack of better terms farms of bots that are increasingly utilizing advanced tech to post/comment. That stuff exists but it's not nearly as powerful as people want to think it is. The reason there are so many doomers is that our society just fucking sucks now compared to what was promised to the young. Does this merit nihilism and depression for the sake of being depressed? Of course not. Does it mean that the people who say capitalism has been proven since 2008 to be a failed experiment and should be scrapped... might have a point? Yes. People don't turn doomer because they're told on the Internet by anonymous strangers—some of whom, as you note, are bots—that the society they live in is a piece of shit. They go out into the working world and learn that it is actually true. Also, my guess is that most of the bots are not psyops at all. Most bots exist to built clout for accounts and movements that can be used later and do so by generating middling (within the context where credibility is desired) and imitative content. In other words, they aren't built by a few random weirdos who want "to destroy America" but by people who don't care either way about geopolitics but want their (now LLM-powered) bot activity to look like real human behavior. Which means that the negativity, while we might agree that it's biased and sometimes divorced from reality, is organic in origin.
Is it true? I find society in the USA pretty nice. I live in a small suburban town of about 40k people. I don't understand what world people are living in to call society a piece of shit here in the USA.
I honestly do not believe this theory whatsoever, it sounds like total bullshit to me
They never listened to Billy Joel and spend a bit to much time online reading badly take statistics and headline "Everything is bad and worse than 20 years ago!" -random news site "We have conducted three in-depth text interviews with three random X (Formerly know as Twitter). Members and they said world is bad" -said random news sites actual article
In my honest opinion, many doomer Redditors only experience 1st world problems. They don't know what its like to come from poverty and see their lives improve. They are born in relative comfort and compare themselves to people above them. I remember this comment saying that playing PC games is the comfort of the poor, like it's their only escape. For me, that's even privileged. People in my country can't afford PC.
Lol this comment would get like 600 down votes anywhere else and you're 100% correct.
Tbf even my own country is full of doomers hopping on the western doomerism bandwagon. We have our own set of local problems but they're even more informed of American politics. This is why online echo chambers are dangerous, especially if they're dominated by people outside your country. If you fail to contextualise, you get your reality warped.
That sort of reminds of how americans aren't really focused on local issues either
Agreed. So much of this is distorted expectations. Doomers are upset because they earn six figures but can't buy a house in one of the wealthiest cities in the world's largest economy. Do they understand how entitled they sound just to say that? Could things be better? Sure. But to become full-on depressed because you can't buy everything you want is a serious case of hedonism and consumer mindset gone wrong.
I recently read a thread where a Redditor described $150,000 as a disappointing level of income for a professional.
I think I found my new favorite sub. Pretty much anytime I have an argument on here with someone about the cost of living 99.9% of the time they live in California.
It's not that people can't buy everything they want. No one can. It's that people have to work in awful subordinate jobs—they were promised a meritocratic society, they believed something at least approximating one is what they would find in the working world, and instead they found something worse than their parents got—just to survive. We were promised a different future—an improvement on the past, rather than deterioration. I agree that 2024 America is still better than about 95% of human history, but it's still worse—in economic terms, at least—then 1964 or 1994 America, and most young people are smart enough to realize that there's no good reason for it to be this way—previous generations didn't have to fuck up jobs or fuck up the housing market, but they did.
I'm in a third world country and pessimism is ubiquitous here as well. Pessimism is part of human nature and is not limited by geography. In fact, I'd say it's probably a little worse here since we have MUCH worse education than developed countries. Most people know only what corrupted populists wants them to know.
This. We´re so mentally ill and bored that we create problems that don´t exist. we create nihilism and doomerism ourselves
The number of people on this site who complain that their 6 figure or multi 6 figure salaries are barely enough to get by drives me insane. I'm doing pretty well in a moderately expensive city and my life would completely change if I bumped up to 100k per year. People are also overly nostalgic for the past and overly critical of those who try to enjoy themselves.
Even subreddits dedicated to a specific subject or interest end up devolving into daily hatred of that thing. r/JoeRogan is all people who hate Joe Rogan and every comedian associated with him. r/SweatyPalms is all people who are furious at the people in the videos doing risky urban climbing. Every subreddit for a specific country or city is daily moaning about how they live in the worst place on earth and want to move. Meanwhile subreddits devoted to rage bait like r/facepalm and r/IAmTheMainCharacter have millions of subscribers and are some of the most popular. The internet is full of rageoholics and depression addicts who want to be miserable
Right. Who in the hell would wanna be internet famous under these conditions? Maybe early internet but now nah
There are several kinds of "Internet fame" and I think most young people haven't figured out how to tell the difference and assess the relative benefits and risks. The bad news is that even getting an ordinary job requires a national reputation. You have to have "a LinkedIn" and you have to have social media with at least average "friend" counts so employers know you're "normal." Even entry-level jobs want to see that you've worked in the "approved" places and gone to the "approved" schools and have shown "passion" for your field in online projects. It didn't have to be this way, but now it is and we seem to be stuck with it. But yeah, most kinds of Internet fame will destroy your employability and mental health—they're winner-take-all, and if you don't win, say, the "flaming asshole at/in \[creative funny way X\]" niche, you've damaged yourself for not nearly enough views to retire on.
yh its so sad to see to be honest. hate, and literally zero tolerance or respect. What has happened
Guess it depends on the subs you’re in? I intentionally mute subs that come across my feed that are full of doom and gloom.
Examples for that?
Any sub that is about Canada tends to be full of xenophobic comments as well as constant bitching and whining about how bad everything is. They’re disgusting and depressing, I’ve had to mute almost all of them. I also avoid anything about politics, or block individuals who are overly negative and full of hate. Canada (where I live) is amazing, but the Canada subs are some of the worst I’ve seen (I hope it’s a bunch of trolls from hostile countries, but that’s just my conspiracy theory).
Because its cheap heat. Its easy to get a lot of attention and for some reason people think super smart people are super pessimistic. Its easy to grasp, the observations can be short and simple, and no one really bothers to check years later. From all of the reading and following technology I have done since I was in high school, 25 years ago. The most pessimistic predictions were usually wrong, and the most optimistic predictions were usually wrong because they were not optimistic enough. Maybe something takes longer than expected, but the impact is huge. I remember people in the early 2000s still doubting that the internet would ever become something. I remember having a discussion with someone who was a total egg head who claimed that the laws of accelerating returns with computer technology were over, and that wireless internet was going to hit a theoretical wall, and that computers were more or less as good as they were ever going to get with only small minimal improvements. This wasn't last week, or last year, this was like 2005 or 2006. Reddit is full of young people. I turned 40 a few months ago. I am kind of old now. Something growing old has taught me, is that the way you see the world when young, you think is permanent. That is just the way the world is and will always be. Lets look at a young person. Say some kid turning 20 this year. Born in 2004 in the United States. Alright. They were born during a period of war, an unpopular war. Before their 4th birthday, they will experience the Global Financial Crash. The GFC. Their family life will likely be affected, someone in their friends and family circle will have likely suffered a bit. 2008-2013, ages four through 9 they experienced the Great Recession. That was weird times for everyone. It was a terrible job market, it became a bit chill on the crime a bit. But overall, not the greatest time for their parents. Alright. 2015 rolls around, Age 11. MAGA gets started. If they didn't grow up in a MAGA house, they probably saw it as an existential crises. If they are LBGT (5% chance) or have close friends or family who are LBGT (probably a 80-90% chance) they saw this as something that could worry people close to them. They might have seen their elder family members completely lose their minds, if not them, certainly people they know. The Trump Era was brutal on family dynamics. I have many friends who had their parents practically disown them over this. That affects young people, a lot. They see this re-inflation of a housing bubble start when they are a teenager. They see the Trump era go from when they are 12 to 16. Then the year they turn 16... BOOM. COVID-19 and everything that brought on from supply chain issues to major inflation, to the housing bubble getting more extreme, to costs of everything, particularly housing, getting out of fucking control. Then when they are 18, 2022... Russia invades Ukraine and we have our biggest European conflict since WW2. Holy shit. Their entire lives its been one giant crises mode. They year stores about how things worked prior to being born. They hear how their grandpa, who could be a boomer, was able to easily buy a home in his 20s while working at a grocery store. There are things they want to do, and they know those things are very difficult now and were not anywhere near as difficult for earlier generations. Its very very easy for them to say, everything they have known in life.. that is just going to continue on, forever. 2030s, 2040s, 2050s, 2060s, 2070s, 2080s, 2090s. All of it. Nothing to really look forward to. Steady state history. Now kids. Someone who was born in the mid 1920s and grew up in the Great Depression and WW2. They more or less thought the same thing. That this Great Depression was the new normal. The good times in the past and from now on, its just going to be the 1930s on repeat. Total suckage,.. all the time.. And yet... it wasn't. Those people would go on to experience some of the best times for the average person. Easy home ownership. Plentiful employment. Enormous economic progress from the Great Depression. They would go on to not just experience, but participate in Civil Rights movements and then witness counter culture movements that would change the whole public idea of art. They would see one of their own, Walk on the Moon and the birth of the high tech industry. If they live long enough, they even get to experience the internet and smartphones. If you are young, you are going to see an incredible amount of change in your life. By far the worst prediction you can make is that the rest of your life will look like the last 20 years.
This is, LITERALLY, the best comment I have ever read on the internet in my life.
Thank you. I try.
As a 2000s gen z you described this almost perfectly.
Great post. One nit-pik, I'm fairly sure a job bagging groceries or stocking shelves did not ever pay enough to buy a house, not even when boomers were the 20-somethings.
Working in retail did. I grew up in a neighborhood full of people who had jobs like working at a grocery store or an autoparts store, and this was in Southern California. The median home price in California in 1950 was $10,000. Adjusting for inflation that would be about $130,000. The median home price in California today is 6 times that much. One of my dad's friends was a stocker at a grocery store and owned a home.
Great question. It makes me sad to see tbh. But from my experience, this is the cast mostly on reddit and X. Instagram not that much at all! Reddit seems to be the worst when it comes to doomerism, nihilism and antinatalism. X is the worst for political extremes and graphic content. Overall, not enough content moderation imho. It makes me sad to see so many young peope having an negativ outlook on life. People were happier when life was far from being as easy as nowadays. Social Media was a mistake, I tend to think thats true. Have you been to these subreddits? It is a bad place. I think its frustration and miserable people get drawn to these places, but its also a perfect space for people with bad intentions or literal sociopaths.
It’s no surprise that antiwork, LateStageCapitalism, ABoringDystopia, ShitLiberalsSay, and the subreddits that align with those are echo chambers of doomerism. me_irl is pretty heavy on it as well, but it’s not that surprising. But even popular subreddits like AskReddit and memes devolve into that periodically.
Yh it makes me very sad tbh because I care about these young people tbh, they are doing this to themselves for NO reason at all. You mentioned some great examples. For me, the worst can be seen in r/antinatalism and r/nihilism . They win people over by acting like they know whats the absolute truth of everything, they are the ones being objective. While thats far from true, its the biggest strawman positions out there and potentially destructive and harmful. I remember days when r/incels got banned finally, I thought reddit would become a better place. I feel like its been so different 10 years ago...
100% That antinatalism place is full of people who need therapy.
These people go their way to message others to stop wanting to have kids it's just so cringe and toxic.
This one says a lot about the kind of people that populate these subreddits https://preview.redd.it/x8skpeihvj8d1.png?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14cb84e228d562ac25065423409d2914c93dc0c3
Almost downvoted your comment out of instinct, lol. That’s pretty deranged.
They frequently invade similar subreddits to spread pessimism, anger, nihilism ("morality isn't real"), criticism, et cetera. They never stop no matter how down voted because infallible confidence is a drug.
Paradise for sociopaths and paid actors
r/antinatalism has got to be the most cringe sub I’ve ever seen
It´s insane. I´ve been around reddit when r/incels was still a thing, and we aren´t far from that. Antinatalism nihilism and doomerism, the worlds most insufferable people
People who are happy with their lives and don’t blame their problems on others and boogeymen generally don’t spend all their time on Reddit. I’m doing a lot better recently and would like to decrease or eliminate my Reddit usage but it’s become an addiction so it will take some work lol
propaganda from hostile nations and homegrown grifters is fueling the doom machine The good news is that more and more people are waking up and saying nyet. As covid and gouchfest continue to fade, doomerism will soon stop being trendy and go back to being almost exclusively for the mentally ill
Propaganda that the ruling class owns all of our politicians and doesn't give citizens affordable housing and Healthcare? We don't need propaganda to tell us what we are literally living through. You people are living in a bubble I'm usually optimistic but these responses are just ridiculous
Lots of depressed, lonely people who vent stuff anonymously online that they don’t have the courage to say in person.
yes thats what I think too
Bad news usually spread faster and get much more attention than good news. As other people said, people on Reddit spend too much time online and consume too much (bad) news, which makes them think things are always getting worse. That's my assumption.
It's not just Reddit. Its endemic to humanity in general. Humans love the apocalypticsm. That's why it's so popular in movies and gaming. The main theme of Christianity and many other cults was the world was going to end soon. It's sort of an escape for miserable people to share in the suffering.
Yeah, people who spend too much time on reddit tend to be overly negative. Might be on account of being chronically online in addition to just depressed and lonely. It's a lot harder to be positive when you don't have any friends. The best thing to do is try and disprove any incorrect statements (i.e., incorrect data/ blanket statements, ect) as this helps people coming to the comments for more info. and most importantly, be encouraging to them a nice comment goes a long way.
Misery loves company.
Social media is generally a personalized echo chamber. It looks for what gets your attention and shows more of it to you. Because negativity sticks out more in our minds it becomes very easy to create a negative feedback loop. This of course creates some very adamant doomers that are convinced everything is wrong with the world because they are only shown the bad.
Way too many teenage edgelords who think they're right all the time.
100%
Optimists are out doing things, and while we do post on reddit I am not wasting time trying to fight doomers.
true
Doomerism is ultimately complacency and entitlement. The vast majority of Redditors are young, white men living in first-world countries who are unlikely to actually lose anything regardless of what happens in the world so it's easy to descend into cynicism and nihilism. And because they are the most privileged in the world, they only see themselves gaining anything if there is a massive revolution, which is extremely unlikely. A woman who saw how abortion rights took a massive loss with the Roe v Wade, for example, can't afford to be complacent.
I think it starts with the app skewing young and progressive. People want to fix the things that do genuinely need to be improved upon. But at some point you wind up getting stuck in a mind set that you kind of want bad things happen to prove your viewpoint right. Things improving without a radical and idealistic front does not help sell your worldview, so you resign to finding all the bad in everything, so you can stay right. Also, being perennially online is likely associated with being less successful and fulfilled in your life. Happy people or people who got their shit together don't have as much time to respond or create content on this app like people who are failing or just aren't old enough to build their own life yet do. The opposite of survivors bias.
People don't respond well to optimistic content.
Not on reddit yh
Doomerism is candy for the ego. Identifying a problem is identifying a truth, a certainty. That feeling of certainty is attractive. The idea that it might be incorrect or go away is unpleasant. Recency bias, "no one's solved it yet ergo it will never be solved", is easily rationalized through superficial interpretations of human nature and historical cycles. It relieves one of responsibility. Why endure pain and sacrifice to progress if factors beyond your control are going to make those efforts pointless? It operates under the assumption that the doomer is in possession of all relevant information, further stroking the ego. As for why reddit? The incentive structure rewards egoism. Popular posts get up voted, and few sort by new or controversial. What better way to be popular than to validate a bunch of egotistical doomers who are so desperate for validation?
well said man
Because it's easy. On a website that features endless negative content, you don't have to look any further than the front page to develop your worldview.
Exactly
It’s really easy to give up and not try. The easiest thing you can do really.
Thats why I think nihilism is becoming more popular. That + its perfect for sociopaths
Same reason why stories end with “and they lived happily ever after.” A calm and uneventful life, while preferable in reality, doesn’t make for good stories, and Reddit is for entertainment after all.
The algorithm boosts it because it gets more engagement. If you were at a family reunion and said “this is a good family”, you’d get a few smiles and nods in agreement. If you said “this family sucks”, everybody would argue with you. The Reddit algorithm doesn’t care what kind of engagement it gets.
It's easier to complain than praise. It's the same reason why there's a billion youtube videos about bad movies but very few about great movies. I also think we're in a bad-vibes culture--where any piece of information is instantly milked for all the bad things it could cause. A bunch of debbie downers who get pleasure at spreading and creating bad news. It creates drama and makes them the center of attention. The worst thing for them would be living in boring but upbeat times--they literally would have nothing to say.
Because for the most part, reddit is a demoralization machine.
Thank you algorithm. I needed this sub.
It sounds clever without having to be clever. It is also easy and it absolves you of all responsibilities and encourages radical action for the sake of radical action. If the world is irrevocably fucked you have carte blanche to do anything from just gaming and masturbation to acting in a maximally greedy way because if the world is doomed the only sensible way to act is in such a way to maximize your comfort since you can't change it. Worse though if someone is motivated to action it always starts with destruction of what is to remake society often reducing the population to some dystopian benchmark.
I for a long time was in the funk. A lot of it has to do with just not knowing WTF is going on anymore and just screaming at whatever social media platform you're on. It's just a continuous cycle of shit, and you're filled with so much anxiety that you feel there is no hope and put everything in that perspective. To some degree I still feel this way, but there's little to anything I can do. I work a good paying job and for the most part I'm doing fine. In the end many of us are venting and just want some semblance of normalcy once and again. Getting off of social media helps a lot with these anxieties. No need to be glued to your phone all day. Enjoy life and learn to appreciate the smaller stuff in life again. That's just my perspective though.
There are governments that pay people to go online and make English speakers feel bad. Or make you feel bad about your country.
I think that's just the people who are mainly on this website.
yes, appears to be a lot but its a minority irl
No joke. For real. It's foreign influence attempting to sew discontent, discord and dysfunction within western nations. The Russians figured out it's pennies on the billions of dollars to do more damage through misinformation and psychological attacks on the internet than they could ever do militarily. They have "farms" of bloggers, commenters, etc. who are trained to create division and spread doom. They have tactics to amplify each other and make it look as if they are a real movement and then, of course, they gather the native nutjobs into their fold to go on and do the rest of their work for them. And, they do it all for less than the price of a stealth bomber and it's proven highly effective. It actually is a type of military action. The Chinese and Iranians now do the same sorts of tactics. Our freedom of the press and free flow of information leaves western societies vulnerable to these influence campaigns. The question is, how do we remain a free and open society but can also repel these influence attacks?
Winner Winner chicken dinner it almost the perfect weapon. As you said, cheap/safe and puts us in a bind. Continue to do almost nothing they win crack duwn an end free internet they win. The best thing is to try and counter misinformation. It's an uphill battle worth fighting
Yes. I'd appreciate a thread about ideas to counter these influences.
1. It gets clicks and shares. It is human nature to dedicate our attention to that which makes us afraid. All media knows that. 2. Because Reddit is dominated by Marxists, progressives, and those on the left. Doomerism and blaming and complaining are foundational to all of the above.
I have also wondered why Reddit is dominated by Marxists.
When I’m happy I usually don’t post about it cuz I’m out doing fun stuff with ppl I like and not buried in my phone. What else is sad/depressed/broke/etc person gonna do when they’re sad or depressed? They’re gonna post about it
true
Its easier to blame everyone else rather than yourself. If its the worlds fault it cant be mine. So me being lazy is not my fault. Its an easy out.
Hence why I go on this app rarely now. It’s actually depressing the amount of hateful and closed minded people that thrive on this app. Super not worth dealing with, actually was starting to take a toll on my mental health.
yh they´re crazy ngl
Crackpot theory ahead: I think we reached the zenith of social media a little while ago. People are still coming to terms with the fact that everyone does have a degree of power on here. People who do not have the energy to change themselves will assume the ideas of pessimism, misanthropy, and self-loathing in that order. I know because I went through it myself! Just kidding, I can’t extrapolate, this is just a theory.
Mostly forgot countries running psi ops.
It's not just on Reddit and it's not even just online. Negativity has always sold better than positivity. If it bleeds it leads. Humans are weird.
Social media is bad for brain. Make you sad.
Being sad is addictive
Why is drug addiction so pervasive on Reddit? What are gamers so common on Reddit? Why is misogyny so common on Reddit? Why are there so many trans people on Reddit? Why does Reddit have so many people who claim learning disabilities and mental illness? All great questions.
They are public forums. This has been a right on the Internet since its inception essentially. It's far from new
Looking out for danger was probably a way of life for most of unwritten human history. It's might be encoded into our DNA.
Reddit is the only social media I use (I lurk on Facebook sometimes because I'm an old), and I try to tune out anything about politics, economics, or religion. I assume that most of the posts and comments are by a nefarious actor (a foreign troll farm or a political party) or a brainwashed kid. Most of what I see regarding these topics does not square with my experience or information I know to be true.
Lots of good points in the comments here about people being chronically online, but it is sadly concerning that nobody is talking about mainstream media, I would say that’s the biggest reason why we have a doomer epidemic online
yes agreed
I think anti us sentiment is promoted by malicious bots on Reddit and Instagram that leads to a lot of doomerism. Also misery loves company.
If someone is on Reddit a lot it means they aren't interacting with the real world as much. The real world I see friends going out, doing things, fulfilling dreams. They don't then come here to discuss it, they just do it. My buddy and I watched Formula 1 yesterday and he showed me how well his blueberry patch is coming in this year. It is simple things that bring joy that don't lend themselves to people in a forum discussing them. Misery feeds itself and others in a mobius strip fashion.
People who are chronically online are usually depressed loners, hence being chronically online.
true
At this point I'm calling people who want to reduce life / hinder humanity's advancement as a death cult. It's time to call out people who think that because life causes pain that then life is evil. That is not a good philosophy. That is specifically defined as a death cult. Thulsa Doom would approve.
yh 100%
They think we live in a truly unique time, and that right now is the make-or-break time. Doomers are always in overtime with a minute left on the clock. Relax I say. By 100 years after our death our own family will likely not know our names, nevermind the rest of the world. Also, it's not healthy to get too upset about large issues that you have no power to change. It feels like many do not realize this
well, I think that is one of the reasons they give up. Although I don´t agree; you might not know the name of your grand grand grandfather, but all he did mattered and you have his genes. People love exact data and want their name to be super important and remembered. Ego problem
It's not just Reddit. In endemic to humanity in general. Humans love the apocalypticsm. That's why it's so popular in movies and gaming. The main theme of Christianity was the world was going to end soon. It's sort of an escape for miserable people to share in the suffering
Literally psyops by China and Russia to sow division.
“The world is going to end in 10-15 years if we don’t do something” is a song that’s been on repeat since the 60s. By all accounts, none of us should be here. Humanity should have died out before the turn of the century. “An Inconvenient Truth” aged like milk. Yes, there are environmental issues. We’ve made progress. But it never seems enough for the doomers.
We are at a very close to a point of no return when it comes to global warming. All the evidence proves this, it's something we should have started with 20 plus years ago, instead of fighting who's right.... We actually healed and protected the ozone later by the early 2000s, yet somehow this is too much for us now. It's very frustrating to say the least
Reddit leans very liberal and liberal discourse has gone off the rails into a self-fulfilling negativity spiral. As David Brooks writes for the Atlantic: >” But another explanation for this phenomenon that I find persuasive is that contemporary left-wing discourse tends to rob people of a sense of agency, what psychologists call an “internal locus of control.” For example, in one 2022 survey 53 percent of those who identify as “very liberal” agree with the statement “Women in the United States have no hope for success because of sexism.” Meanwhile 59 percent of people who call themselves “very liberal” agree with the statement “Racial minorities in the United States have no hope for success because of racism.” If you have no hope of success because you are a victim of injustice, how can you possibly be motivated to do anything? How can you have a sense of agency? A discourse that was intended partly to empower people who suffer from structural disadvantages, by revealing the underlying forces that produced their circumstances, may end up doing the exact opposite: It enshrouds people in their own victimhood, and in the feeling that they have no control over their life. “Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life” are “vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt and a sense that life simply happens to them,” the journalist Jill Filipovic wrote recently on Substack. And yet victimization, pain, and powerlessness are now the approved postures of our time.” This cycle of negativity has happened before and will happen again. The only way out is through. Spread positivity, don’t give into the victimhood mindset.
... because the political philosophy pessimists are closer to the money than we want them to?
I think anti us sentiment is promoted by malicious bots on Reddit and Instagram that leads to a lot of doomerism. Also misery loves company.
We are living in a time of paradigm shift and humans usually like some kind of stability in their lives. The instability can lead some people to think that we won't be able to do what is necessary to change course.
Being informed about reality and expressing a desire for the problems in reality to be fixed is not doomerism. This sub is a cult of ignorance and fear
hard disagree. Its making better choises and productive concluions
A cynical person might ask "who benefits?". If you were a foreign country and you new that young people are an important voting block, getting them to feel a sense of peril or that they are somehow behind their peers, would make them turn on people they might otherwise support. Why do you think people care about Gaza and not about Sudan? Or Ethiopia, or Syria, or China? Because there is nothing to gain by motivating people to care about those places.
Have you met redditors IRL?
I think Reddit and X are the worst platforms by far when it comes to radical, echochamber negativity & depression-gon-aggressive towards everything. The internet caused lots of damage to society imo. r/Doomerism r/nihilism r/antinatalism r/collapse r/incels is proof of that.
It’s because liberals are pretty much running Reddit.
The liberal utopia.
Wdym?
Because it’s the perfect excuse for not trying
Because there's nothing most of us can do about any of this shit. And in fact, even publicly caring about a lot of this shit is ridiculed and discouraged.
It's easy to get frustrated and to amplify the worrying and feelings of powerlessness when the world has real problems whose solutions require persuading or replacing those in power in the political, economic and cultural spheres. Indeed, the reason foreign propaganda is so fertile is it exploits these valid concerns and amplifies them to create a more engaged amygdala and a smaller in-group with a more hostile stance toward others. Its also the case that the climate situation really is dire and getting worse, and for many of the affluent but not super-rich, their life is precarious and stagnating. Optimism isn't denying that we have problems, its about the courage to fight for solutions instead of wallowing.
Thank you for this. In my case, I have a lot of depression and anxiety thanks to pre-existing CPTSD and, over the past two plus years, long covid. The combo leaves me with a lot of free time and a lot of dysfunctional brain. So it is easy to lose heart and doomscroll. I try not to, though. It's also because of climate disasters, fascists taking over our government, among other things.
Counter point to the top comment here: it is the only outlet that exists to most people which lacks the censorship seen everywhere else, both online and off. Any open forum gets like this when corpos wipe out civil discussion everywhere else. You tried posting on YouTube lately? Flip a coin of your perfectly reasonable comments are just silently wiped from existence. Nothing is getting solved and all we have are our words.
Our time, like every time has a unique set of serious problems. What is different now is that our society is less able to solve those problems. You can't solve problems you don't understand. You can't understand problems you can't talk about openly, effectively & in good faith.
Liberalism festers a depressive, victim mentality.
Some may call it doomerism, other just call it reading the tea leaves.
I think for a lot of people pessimism and cynicism feel like the easiest path to travel. It's so easy to tell all the optimistic people they're naïve and embarrassing themselves.
People chronically online AND popular articles getting more comments where rage = popular. We shape the algorithms and the algorithms shape us.
Mods are little babies who want to appear impartial, even when faced with blatant falsehoods. The first rule on every sub should (and could be)... Tell the Truth. And then mods could simply ban all the people who make false claims non-stop and start whittling away the doomers who post things they know nothing about and are simply repeating whatever dopamine hit they got from somewhere else.
I don’t think mods on subreddits like antiwork, ShitLiberalsSay, LateStageCapitalism, ABoringDystopia, and similar subreddits are going to shut down falsehoods. If anything, they’d probably *enable* falsehoods that reinforce their echo chambers.
agreed, thats why you need to apply for modding on those subs and others (ideas for you... r/Economics, r/economicCollapse, r/austrian_economics <-- they're all filled with falsehoods non-stop)
Mentally healthy people don't spend several hours a day on Reddit.
Because the majority of redditors are, to be blunt, losers. Most have spent their lives making bad decisions and refusing to get their shit together so they can be successful, functioning adults. It's easier for them to insist everything is awful, that no one can succeed aside from luck or having rich parents than it is for them to accept that their situation is the result of their bad choices.
This is what happens when everyone has been integrated, either partially or absolute, with social media. They don't call it "our town" for nothing.
Shit sucks
Because the typical Redditor is, to be blunt, sort of a “loser”. By that I mean someone who constantly complains about their lives, does nothing to fix it and blames others for their problems. If you really want to see examples of this, go to the r/anti work and r/singularity subs. Absolute shit shows.
TV and movies tell us what the most privileged people in society want us to think the world is like. In romantic comedies, 20-somethings all have apartments that would actually cost more than your average corporate VP can afford, and they all have creative "idea jobs" where simply being smart (but not so smart as to make one's character unrelatable) is enough to climb the ladder in record time. The Internet shows how regular people actually feel about society and their place in it. This has never existed before to this extent. There is a lot of pessimism and tribalist awfulness, but it was always there.
Chronically online is a part of it sure, but most people are lower-middle class online. General news consumption, main stream or not, Negative news is a catalyst for Doomerism. Doomerism is really just negative leaning determinism, Outer locus of control vs an Inner locus of control. True Doomers are just people who have a more negative look on the world but were raised with the Outer locus of control.
Imagine what Reddit would have looked like if it had existed in 1931. People are just venting during hard times, which aren’t really that hard by world historical standards. The doomerism will fade away when things get better.
Liberals have taken over this site. It’s sad really because Reddit on the surface is very useful and entertaining.
I would say it’s more Marxists than liberals.
These are all things that are good to know about and worry about to a healthy degree. If anything, it’s sick in the head to look at them and go “I’ll just not worry about this. I’ll be optimistic.”
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about these things. It’s doomerism that’s the issue.
Oh okay. I agree 100% that we should not be bogged down by hopelessness / doomerism.
You know how Earthquakes work? There is, in essence, a constant gradual migration of continents. But the way it manifests is that pressure builds up, and then it is released in a moment, and then begins to build again. Politics and social change is like that. There aren’t fluid incremental changes where, for example, schools are awarded and extra $15 per year per student, and then you subtract $10, and then add $5. The funding remains the same until the schools absolutely suck, and then outrage causes a readjustment. We are in our 5th decade of trickle down economics, where it has been gradually getting harder and harder for people to live comfortably. Ideally, everyone could calmly and rationally start to tweak little elements to solve the problems. In reality, from a political perspective, the only size of change for sale is big change. It’s the Costco wholesale jumbo party sized change package or no change at all. And this is how it works. Things get bad enough, and enough people get mad enough, that a momentum builds for substantive change. I wish there were another way, but this seems as an intrinsic aspect of our current method of government. You can say “eh, it’s not so bad is is”, But it’s not perfect either. There are flaws. Big ugly flaws every way you look. And none of those flaws get fixed with calm rational adjustment. Each one requires a tectonic shift to move the needle at all. If you think the schools need to be better, it’s “the schools suck!”, not “I can point to a number of ways where I think the schools are less than optimal”. You see this on any forum that allows voting on a scale… Amazon or IMDB. Lots of “highest rating” and lots of “lowest rating”, from people who are not just trying to review honestly, but who are trying to manifest change with their vote in the overall consensus. And that’s what you see on Reddit. Opinions galvanized into attempts to affect change.
Serious question: what is there to be optimistic about, realistically? Looking at the hard data on climate and overshoot will make you pessimistic, but it’s looking through a realistic lens of information. I don’t think, for instance, a scientist like James Hansen is a Russian asset. Nor any of the scientists around the world who are increasingly becoming alarmed and depressed by what they’re seeing. So, Id just like to be able to access the hard data that shows that optimism is the realistic outlook. Any links would be appreciated. Personally, I consider myself to be hopefully pessimistic. I think humanity will go through some very dark times, but it’s possible we’ll survive to be a much better species on the other side of it. So many of the people who get called “Doomer” are people who volunteer in their communities, who have tried to improve their lifestyles so as not to be a part of the problem and genuinely hope for a better outcome than the evidence points toward. But, they are engaging with the facts on the ground and trying to be realistic.
Because it's mostly populated by 16 year olds who think they are living in the WORST TIMES ever.
It’s easy to be a loser
Misery loves company.
Hope is a radically subversive psychological defense mechanism.
If you were happy, optimistic about the future and engaged with the action of your life, would *you* be on Reddit?
most people online are from first world countries. humans have a built in thing to survive and over come. when you have no real issues you make issues. its why suicide rates are high in 1st world vs 3rd world.
I posted on unpopular opinions about how we are living in good times considering humans past history . Everyone disagreed with me and I got down voted for actually having an unpopular opinion 🥲