We get it. The world is doomed. Everything is fucked. You are so smart to know this. You are so courageous for speaking this raw and unfiltered truth. Wow, so cool. I love your certainty. It’s so firm and rigid. Your negative vibes and unprocessed anxiety are transferring to my body. I love that. Thank you for giving me all these doom pills with no hope pills. So kind of you. And you’re so right: all the hopeful people are culty, stupid, and uncool.
Doom fetishism: a fixation on scenarios where things go drastically wrong. Doom fetishists represent a distinct type of intellectual, often found among smart and rational-minded men, who secretly derive a “special feeling” from showcasing their knowledge about our collective dire state of affairs.
Doom fetishists are fools, but like many of the other modern fools examined in this newsletter,1 they are not completely wrong. Their obsessive hyperfocus on doom scenarios can increase our awareness of the dangers ahead. However, their egoic attachment to their descriptive prowess makes them incredibly foolish.
Their foolishness stems from their intellectual arrogance, coupled with a maladaptive way of processing their anxiety. As a rule of thumb, when discussing doom scenarios, one should speak forthrightly, and even passionately, but with intellectual humility. Reality is too complex for our primate peabrains to understand, and one false premise can be the foundation of an impressively constructed theoretical castle that, on the surface, seems impenetrable but is ultimately flawed.
The second problem arises when a doom fetishist speaks without hope. Now, one need not provide hopeful solutions, spoken with the same rational and epistemic impressiveness as they outlined the problem; however, they should convey a sense of hope. They doom pill us by speaking with knowledgeable authority but without hopeful vibes. This doom pilling leads to what philosopher Mark Fisher calls “reflexive impotence”: the awareness of doom scenarios without sufficient countervailing hope dispirits people, thereby bringing such scenarios about.
After years of studying doom-pilling topics like collapse, existential risks, suffering risks, metacrisis, and all the other prefix-crisis terms, I realized that my sense of collective hopelessness directly corresponded to my sense of individual hopelessness. I had to lose my mind to see with my heart, and only then did I fully feel the truth: we will make it.
Since then, I have lived with the following existential stance: I am steely-eyed about the challenges, but at my core, I embody radical hope, a kind deeply aware that we will figure this out. We just won’t be doing it with the “minds” we currently have. Sure, these minds are useful tools in specific domains, but they serve as a poor compass for existential wayfinding.
We can learn from the foolishness of doom fetishists and avoid the world-fulfilling prophecies they are casting. Rationalist types need reasons and evidence for everything, which is great for creating neat theories that sound smart but not for navigating the wildness of life. It’s much more adventurous to fully believe we will make it without fully knowing how.
Feel the hopeful vibes emanating from what’s probably my best playlist, originally inspired by the “It’s Gonna Get Way Better” entry:
Purpose pornographers, midwits, intellectual serviles, snarkers, trolls, time drunks, work martyrs, hustle narcissists, and many more to come!