Are you a doomer?
It's time to have a serious discussion about our doom-loving tendencies.
Have you fallen victim to doomerism? Don’t get me wrong, if you don’t feel at least some sense of dread at least once in awhile at the current state of the world that’s wild. I’d encourage you to pay a little more attention. 🫶🏻
Doomer: A term used primarily on the Internet to describe people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems. (Anna, you mean Nihilism? Yes, but remember the Internet.)
This includes but is not limited to:
Overpopulation
Peak Oil
Climate Change
Pollution
Nuclear Weapons
Runaway AI
War
And the eventual way one or more of these problems will inevitably lead to human extinction 🤩
Allow me the pleasure of giving you a brief history of doomerism. The early doomers found themselves like many of us, online. It was 2008 and while fledgling DM features on social media were learning to walk, we had Internet Forums.
Peakniks coined the term when discussing the possibility that we’d reach peak oil (when oil production will begin an irreversible decline) and society would immediately collapse as a result. These early doomers riffed on ways to face this collapse from making accommodations to their home to not having children. And yes, this is where modern doomsday prepping or “preppers” got it’s start.
Assuming they were frozen in fear from all the imminent doom that lie ahead, we don’t hear much of the doomer term again until 2018.
I hate to do this, as I’ve already invited you into the bummer trenches today. But we’re going to talk about 4chan now. By the time doomers made their way to 4chan the definition had evolved slightly. Doomers were now largely characterized as “20-something men who stopped trying.” In fact, this new definition included visuals. They may look familiar.
It wasn’t until 2019 when the term hit mass audiences in a New Yorker piece titled, What If We Stopped Pretending? About you guessed it— impending and irreversible climate change. Doomerism infiltrated pop-culture in the most overt ways it ever had. (Black Mirror, anyone? Handmaids Tale?)
Up until this point the doomer stereotype was, for lack of a better term, kind of a loser dude. But 2020 birthed The Doomer Girl or “Doomerette.” There are so many memes of this that I’m just going to invite you to Google on your own, as I simply am running out of energy.
Okay, so we’re caught up on doomers.
In addition to the definition shifting over the last 15 years, what doomers are feeling doomed-out about has too. I’d call the original list macro-doom-factors. Now we have micro-doom-factors too. Everything from the loneliness epidemic and online dating to Ozempic. The same stomach-turning dread, just on a smaller scale.
But the plight of the doomer is this:
True doomers seem to fall into a trap. There’s too much inevitable doom and thus pointless to do anything to improve quality of life (for themselves or others in the meantime.) This mentality runs rampant across the Internet, but this creator summarizes the frustration.
TLDR: He uses capitalism as an example saying, “it’s true that capitalism is the root of several, serious problems. It’s also true that most everyday individuals are not in the place to defeat capitalism on their own. When major societal overhaul is necessary, we can’t just say ‘let’s get to the root of the problem’ and leave it there for someone else to figure out in 300 years. We need to do smaller life-improving things in the meantime.” I’ll link his follow up video here.
Oh, and don’t get me started on another Tiktok aesthetic rabbit hole. But yes, #doomercoreoutfits #doomercore #doomeraesthetic are real things too.
That’s a lot of doom, may I have something else please?
Yes, kitten.
Welcome bloomers.
The antithesis of the doomer is the bloomer. What I find especially comforting about the bloomer is that they aren’t just a vessel of blind toxic positivity— lights on, no one’s home type beat. The bloomer does have knowledge about the harsh realities of life, so their positive outlook doesn’t come from blissful ignorance.
The bloomer (allegedly) pursues a deeper meaning in life. Or from what it sounds like, is an active participant in life, change-making, and joy instead of ceasing to engage at all because things are too bleak. Too doomed.
Despite self-describing as a healthy-pessimist, this made me laugh: “The bloomer takes and swallows the proverbial ‘red pill’, digests it, and when it comes out of his behind, it serves as compost for beauty.”
So doomer? Bloomer? I don’t think it’s either/or. Realistically we’re all probably oscillating between the two most of the time.
If you’re yearning for more of me and the Midwest let me point you toward the most recent issue of Title Magazine you can find my piece, “Midwest, Nice” there.
Thankfully true,
