r/doomer Jan 18 '20

notes from a doomer

2.5k Upvotes

Sometimes I wonder how we are not all walking around in a state of pure unquellable panic. I am, and you are, but why aren’t they? Have they truly numbed themselves to the gravity of the situation?

You walk around alienated, existing on this world but not in it, perpetually dissatisfied. Perhaps at one point you lived in this world, but you can’t be sure, and it is irrelevant. Nothing is fulfilling. You spend all day hiking to the top of a mountain to see the sunset. You arrive at the summit on the brink of dawn, just as the orange glow begins to flirt with the blue sky.

Despite it’s undeniable beauty, you watch this sunset rise and fall and are left with a feeling of emptiness. You yearn to experience the sunset with an intensity that is impossible to achieve just by looking at it. You need to possess the essence of the sunset and won’t be satisfied until you do, and as such you will never be satisfied.

Even sex, if you are one of us lucky enough to expirience it, doesn’t grant you this intensity you are searching for. During it you don the red eyes of an ape, drunk with lust and desire, yet just as the ape’s desires are about to be fulfilled, the human returns, disgusted by the apes appetite, and with an uncomfortable sense of dissatisfaction. You finished, but you have not arrived anywhere.

Sometimes it feels like the only thing that will satisfy this insatiable lust would be ripping your partner apart, but we know that too would fall just short.

This sense of dissatisfaction permeates everything you do. You yearn for intensity of experience but you never arrive at it, you feel disunity between your mind and your body. You may for a brief moment, maybe only a few times in your life, experience immediacy and satisfaction, but as soon as you grasp onto it it slips away. You chase these moments to no avail.

But you will soon find, if you haven’t already, that behind this dissatisfaction is something more sinister.

It has been called a sense of unreality, and this is the term we will use. More medically minded people might call it depersonalization, and it is colloquially referred to as an existential crisis, but to me these terms fall short and convolute the raw terror of our conviction.

Everyone has experienced this, as far as I can tell, but only we cannot escape from it.

Everyone arrives at this unreality slightly differently, for some of us it is gradual and for some of us it happens suddenly, for some of us it lingers and grows. But once a man has seen it, the world can never be an understandable place.

You wake up from a restless sleep and in your brief delusion you may forget about your obsession, but it soon hits you. You look at your skin, and if you are unwise you might look at yourself in the mirror. You are filled with unease and grow tense. You know you are human, but something separates you from reality.

Some of us stop here, laying in dark rooms all day, torturing ourselves with thoughts of somethingness and nothingness. But most of us don’t have this awful luxury. We have to brush this away, and reality becomes a screen that we watch and interact with, but never break through.

We can maintain this facade with a detached persistence, but it is fragile, and all it takes is the simplest reminder to throw us back into doomed unreality. Maybe you realized how insane it is that we drive cars, chunks of earth shapen and propelled by dead animals and plants, or you see a man walking alone and our reminded of our inevitable fate.

We see too deep and too much, and what we see is chaos.

This phenomenon is not unique to our generation; we have many friends throughout history. Edgar Allen Poe was one of us, read this line from his short story Berenice

“Yet differently we grew --I ill of health, and buried in gloom --she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side --mine the studies of the cloister --I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation --she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours.”

The poet John Keats was one of us, writing that “I feel as if I had died and am now living a posthumous existence”

(These are just two examples among countless, but these will do for now )

But there is something unique about our position. While the world is fundamentally absurd, and always has been, it has taken on a new character since the turn of the century.

We are growing symbiotic with machines, our entire worldviews shaped and funneled through a small sheet of illuminated glass we keep in our pockets. We are lab rats, the first generation to grow up being raped by information from the internet. We can connect to anywhere in the world instantly, bearing witness with tragedy and absurdity in a way impossible to anyone ever before. This shrunk into our hands and we walk around with external harddrives for our brains, at any quiet moment eagerly and mindlessly shoving these illuminated pieces of glass into our faces, distracting ourselves from what was happening.

But we have woken up. We know that the world is a cruel, sick, and meaningless place. The one pure constant throughout history for people like us is what we are now hopelessly destroying- nature. Even if we could ascend all of our anxieties and attempt to lead a meaningful life, what would the point be if we are faced with inevitable collapse.

We cannot live in the comfortable, optimistic world of the boomers, accepting what we see and touch as reality. For the boomers, the world is a fundamentally orderly place, spar the occasional disturbance which their preoccupation with the present allows them to ignore. For us, the world is not rational, and not orderly. This shit is fucked up.

So where do we go from here? We could resign to the inevitable collapse of civilization, laying in our beds until we suffer from nervous diseases and wither away, while boomers drink martinis in their penthouses and go to nightclubs.

Or we can spit in the face of their hopeless optimism and take control of our world, dancing on the ashes of an unknown fate.

If you choose the first option, your life stops here. Try to numb yourself well and continue to distract yourself with anything possible until the end. I wish you the best of luck.

But if you want to fight against the absurdity of the modern condition, I have an antidote. We have to establish a unique cultural identity beyond resignation. We don’t have to lie about our inevitable fate in order to oppose it. We need to make our own art, write our own books, film our own movies. The message of these doesn’t matter so long as they are made. Do anything to disrupt the perceived normalcy of the world, make people think about what they are doing.

I have only brushed the surface of my thoughts on this stuff, but I needed to get them out. If you read through it connect w me, even if you’re just telling me I’m a loony.


r/doomer 6h ago

Life lost to doom scrolling is the saddest way to die

6 Upvotes

r/doomer 18h ago

Me, avoiding life

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39 Upvotes

sometimes you just have to sit there and watch everything unfold because participating in life sounds like way too much work. 💀


r/doomer 7h ago

In this simulation, all good things turned out to be traps and horrible for me

4 Upvotes

As the title says. What is the point of living then, because everything that I thought was awesome and good were just stepping stones to horrific events that shattered my confidence and spirit, leaving me feeling helpless and hopeless with nowhere to turn. It's as if whoever is controlling the simulation knew I would act and choose a certain path given circumstances, and then set those up for me letting me fall into perilous situations that broke me. I am broken. I cannot continue in this simulation, or perhaps any simulation anymore.


r/doomer 13h ago

😂✌️

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10 Upvotes

r/doomer 19h ago

I just wanna be left alone for a while.

9 Upvotes

I wanna stay in a dark pit of blackness with only my walkman and a set playlist.

No contact with the outside world at all and no one to worry about me.


r/doomer 1d ago

lol

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124 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

Drank a whole fucking bottle of gin at 4AM. Where did it all go wrong

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44 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

Hours disappear like this

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65 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

The light at the end of the tunnel is the moon in the sky.

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18 Upvotes

Unreachable.


r/doomer 1d ago

On my way to the liquor store at 6 AM to buy booze 🤙

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69 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

It's never enough

14 Upvotes

Nothing I do will ever be enough. I can't fix anything. The problems in the world are unfixable. Climate change, political violence, hatred, and everything else. Evil will always win, hatred will always win. It's hopeless. I'm officially done. I've done activism for years, I've maintained a sliver of hope. But I'm done. I'm gonna lay in bed and drink booze and wait to die. I fucking hate everyone. I've done my goddamn best to make something of myself but I just keep failing. Fuck life, fuck the world, fuck everyone.


r/doomer 1d ago

Sorry dude

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26 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

The Latest and Greatest State of the Climate Report Just Released by American Meteorological Society

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5 Upvotes

r/doomer 2d ago

It could have been different but it wasn't

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34 Upvotes

r/doomer 2d ago

"Ты не верь слезам.." by Bad Comedian

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1 Upvotes

r/doomer 3d ago

This is so scary

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16 Upvotes

What am.i doing with my life


r/doomer 2d ago

I'm so sick of AI and productivity bullshit

9 Upvotes

I work in IT as a programmer. In lockdown (and several years after) we worked from home and back then I cared about productivity because I could finish my work in 4 hours and spend the other 4 hours for personal stuff.

But now, I'm working from the office. If I finish my work faster I have to work on something else and this just drains my brain even. more.

But what I find the most disturbing is that my colleagues always talk about productivity and how we have to deliver more. They just seem brainwashed. For example, during the lunch break most of my colleagues eat at the office's "restaurant" which is expensive and pretty mid just to save 10-15 minutes and return faster to their laptops. The office building is near a university campus and there are a lot of nice restaurants (most of them cheap because most of their clients are students) where you can disconnect from work during your lunch break.

Sometimes I bring my own food from home and then I eat it with my colleagues at that crap canteen (luckily nobody cares that I'm not buying anything from them) and everyone just talks about AI and how revolutionary it is and how much the AI is helping us at work. But the only ones that benefit from them are the big corporate executives. 10% of the company was fired to reduce costs and they gave us Claude subscriptions and they just expect us to work 2 times more. When I'm bringing this to my colleagues they are just "people were against steam engines/industrialization/computers and blah blah blah". Yeah, that's right, but back then people worked 12 hours a day in a factory and after industrialization they worked 8 hours.

I can see the use of AI, it's really cool. I built a dashboard for an internal tool and Claude coded the entire frontend. It basically saved me 2-3 days of work, but what's that good for if in those 2-3 days I had to finish a bunch of other tasks much more complicated than a dashboard? Before AI I worked on one project at a time, now I'm working on 2-3 projects at the same time.

And at the end of the day I just feel drained. There's so much information to process, so many choices to make. Everyone is in a hurry, there's no time to clarify the requirements (and most of the time those are written very badly). And let's not forget the reason for going to work: money. This year's raise was 3% of my salary (inflation is like 5-6% in my country). Usually I had a 10-15% increase yearly.

I don't understand after all of those my colleagues are still "we need to be more productive guys", "we need to use more AI".


r/doomer 3d ago

Repost

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14 Upvotes

I don't know if I'm going to enroll in college next year because I feel like school is not for me, but my mother is telling and persuading me to go to college next year so that I can have a degree and secure my future. My older sister is graduating from college this month but she's so arrogant and sometimes belittles me because she bragged that she has more academic achievements and has accomplished more in life than me. I'm completely lost, I don't know what to do anymore


r/doomer 3d ago

I’m done

35 Upvotes

Every single day is the same exact day. Nothing ever changes. I’m starting to sleep with plastic bags over my head and pens in my bed. I just need to not wake up.


r/doomer 3d ago

Doomer 4 Life?

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40 Upvotes

Listening tracks (Belaya Noch + Nazhmi Na Knopku) of Chernikovskaya Hata on full volume. I just can't take it anymore - feel like I'm doomed for life bro, you can call it Dark Night of the Soul, but what if it's just a biological level, and no spiritual alchemy involved. 41 yo M here, struggling all my life. This society is not for me man - people are controling, racing, wearing masks, I just cannot connect with them. I'm not Chosen One, I just don't walk along with society. It's like a cycle - I feel terrible everytime I catch myself trying to "fit" after a long period of suffering.

Much LOVE to all the kindred souls! 🖤


r/doomer 3d ago

Reproducing disgusts me.

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11 Upvotes

Not my channel/content


r/doomer 3d ago

Dreams and hopes are a scam we sell to ourselves

5 Upvotes

I lurk around this sub but never post but today I am feeling extra down so just felt like sharing you know, seeing someone else live the life you wanted and with the person you love stings but atleast she is happy


r/doomer 4d ago

I hate September

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38 Upvotes

Crazy things always happen in this time of the year for me.


r/doomer 4d ago

Bleachwings - None

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1 Upvotes