Climate warming, far right rising, democracy eroding, huges setbacks un humain rights, hate crimes exploding, biodiversity dying, activism more ans more criminalized, etc…it seem society is living its last moments, and doomerism looks like the only rational option. So what prevent you from being a doomer despite all of this ?
It’s hard to articulate but probably the only thing for me right now is the sheer weirdness of everything. It feels like everyone’s perceptions of reality have been shaken loose and unusual things are more likely to happen.
So nothing concrete; just vibes. And uncomfortable vibes at that.
Also, chaos and upheaval lead to change and the most optimistic part of me hopes that whatever emerges from it will be defined by people who have had the courage to resist all of the fear, hate and greed.
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. For me it’s that nothing that is happening is new and if you look carefully nothing is weird or unusual, it’s just the same ol’ same ol’ rehashed from a modern perspective.
The people I love still have many years left to live and I want to enjoy them
If you find out, let me know…. All I’ve tried is organising and drinking, and they take the edge off but not enough
I’ve found drugs can help, too
deleted by creator
Nothing. I won’t stop voting, but I’m old, tired, poor, mentally ill, and have been looking forward to the sweet oblivion of death since I was a small child. What about the country or planet is happening to make the future look bright to anyone, much less me? At best it’s all just meaningless noise.
Ignorance.
I just don’t follow news, especially world news related to the war’s and stuff like that.
And even when I hear something about it I think whether it affect’s me directly, if it doesn’t I just don’t bother thinking about it.
But ignorance is a bliss.
My coping mechanism:
Block/filter out the news!
(Except for positive/uplifting news)It does wonders for your mental health!
Most news sources are for-profit,
and they did some research,
apparently depressing news draws more attention / clicks, which results into more profit for them, but it isn’t good for your mental health.Other news sources just drive an hidden agenda, and aim to manipulate you to believe whatever the rich guy that owns the news site wants.
Also, try to have fun while humanity is sliding down in the background!
Whether you’re depressed or acknowledge and then ignore the facts, will have zero impact on the final outcome which will apply to the whole world.
So might as well aim to be happy in the meantime :)
— Ooh, yeah, baby! This right here is gonna make the last three days worth it. A fat syringe full of clear, medical-grade, Federally-backed estrogen. Aqueous estradiol valerate, to be precise.
— What happens when I inject myself with estrogen?
— Oh, no. No, no, no. Don’t tell me you forgot what estrogen does. Estrogen. Remember? Uh…anticistamines? Feminephrine?
[Hard: Success] — You haven’t forgotten. Generally speaking, patients undergoing hormone replacement treatments will experience a variety of physiological and mental changes. Drier skin, growth of breast tissue, weight redistribution, decrease of body hair growth, shifts in facial fat and musculature. Emotional changes vary wildly between individuals, but are often reported to be “intense”.
— Bzzt. Wrong. Estrogen is like junk, baby. A calm, soothing, smooth-like-butter body high. A referral letter from two medical professionals and a couple of shed tears in a therapist’s chair are the only things keeping every sucker on the street from turning into an E-junkie. Getting it is hard; stopping after you’ve had your first sweet shot is even harder. This is serious shit. And now it’s all yours. Shoot it up!
originally by @[email protected]
I just ignore everything, avoid news, especially local or politics. I just don’t care, don’t plan to ever have children and just hope I’ll get to live the rest of my life with my circle of friends playing games without having to deal with any kind of large crisis that would affect me.
Since I have slightly above avarage salary as someone working in IT, I’m counting on not being rich enough to be of interrest, while also not being poor enough (taking my lack of any expenses on family/car/etc into account) that if the living conditions worsen significatly, it will have already been a problem for more than half of a population way earlier and something will have to be done about it. And even if not, I can still comfortably get by even if prices of everything got 3-4 times as much as they are now, so IDGAF. It’s a privilege, but I’m at a point where I don’t really care what happens to others. For my part, I’m not bringing children into this hopeless mess, and while it’s sad that a lot of innocent will take the fall, I also take solace in that a lot of the people who brought it on themselves will suffer for it.
Connecting with people through music.
hegel’s revolutionary plasm
\\
“In the dark times, should the stars also go out?”
read hegel, play disco elysium. play disco elysium, read marx
I recently found a rap song in the endangered Tlingit language, I also recently had the opportunity to speak to a cousin in a language that stopped being passed down on that side of the family with our shared grandpa, and I also recently got to speak with an Ojibwe woman who is learning that language, about her experiences with it. An Ojibwe dub of Star Wars was recently released, as was the first ever feature film in Norwegian Sign Language. As someone who is interested in languages, their preservation and revitalization, I feel like experience and recent news gives me reason to be optimistic.
Earlier today I learned that there is such a thing as pea milk, which means that there is another and more nutritious plant-based substitute for dairy milk which can be made entirely with local-grown ingredients in Norway. As someone who wants to both see food sovereignty and veganism in Norway, these sorts of advancements in food science leave me optimistic.
When it comes to the topics mentioned in the OP, what keeps me optimistic is just remembering that the course of history is really just entropy, right? Suppression of activism, the erosion of people’s rights, the rise of fascism and the epidemic of hate crime, these are all symptoms of a broader power structure trying to sustain itself by force. But that system just doesn’t have infinite energy to sustain itself, it doesn’t have infinite resources. We see evidence of this in the “little things” like my cousin learning a language that had been forced out of our family: the forces that had pushed the language out of the family could not keep it out indefinitely, because with the effort one family member would take to relearn it, the effort needed for others to do the same gets progressively smaller.
Humans are known as persistence hunters: we certainly don’t need to hunt for food anymore, but the same strategy is certainly useful for hunting down our own oppressors. Oppressors will grow exhausted of trying to fight their inevitable failure, and that’s when they’ll easily be slain as “paper tigers”.
The best thing to focus on in the present moment is simply what you can do. Because any new skill you master, any positive interaction you have, any good news you read, all of that will prove to you that challenges can be overcome, that you can make a difference and that there is still good in the world. It is the little challenges you overcome that make the big challenges easier to overcome in time.
Sent from Mdewakanton Dakota lands / Sept. 29 1837
Treaty with the Sioux of September 29th, 1837
“We Will Talk of Nothing Else”: Dakota Interpretations of the Treaty of 1837
Shits always been like this. Well, maybe not exactly like this, but this level of fucked or worse. There was just a brief blip after WWII when things were relatively stable, and now that its ending things feel a little out of control.
https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16. Myth of Sisyphus.pdf
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don’t know why and they probably don’t either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I’d push it because there’s a guillotine over the horizon. I’m arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it’d always mean existential damnation for me, but I’d purify my hate pushing it.
damn so im not the only one who read some Camus recently? i’m not even an existentialist, i just find the work comforting
Even if I wasn’t an absurdist at a universal atheistic level, it’d be hard to be a communist without being an absurdist at the societal level Camus is writing at. Trench warfare and line go up and electoralism are absurd things which drive you crazy enough to believe in them if you can’t admit how arbitrary and meaningless they are. When you break from that idealism, Camus has the right confrontational framework for what comes next.
There is bugs