Read

We are living through the age of doomerism. A bunch of very real global crises – plus the psychological effects of 24-7 news and doomscrolling – can make it feel like the world is truly falling apart. For gen-z who are coming of age in this environment, it can be paralyzing. But how much of this sense of apocalyptic doom is totally warranted, and how much is shaped by our constant onlineness? And more importantly, how much of this attitude is really helpful? In July 2022, Jane Coaston wrote a New York Times piece called “Try to Resist the Call of the Doomers’’ about how “we are experiencing a new religion of profound pessimism.” According to Coaston, the problem with doomerism isn’t that it honestly points out our challenges, but that it “luxuriates in the awful” and makes people feel so hopeless that they lose agency and don’t work to address what’s wrong in the world.

In the past few years, the phrase “I’m tired of living through a major historical event right now,” has become a pretty all-encompassing meme. From the pandemic to the storming of the US capital, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, financial crises and the climate crisis on top of this, today’s events paint the picture of a world that is extremely unstable and scary.

But our emotional impression of all this is also shaped by our relationship to the media – which is drastically unlike it was even a few years ago. Journalists’ job is largely about exposing problems and holding powerful people and institutions accountable - so it makes sense that there’s going to be a heavy bias toward bad news. But today we spend an average of four hours per day on our smartphones, dramatically increasing the amount of bad news we take in and the proportion of our time we dwell on it compared to previous generations.

There’s also an economic incentive driving the negativity that shades all the media we consume. A study from Harvard Business School confirmed that on Twitter, negative news spreads farther and wider than positive. News publications have a vested interest in filling our feeds with fatalism to get clicks. And we can see this in the panicking, alarmist, catastrophic tone that characterizes so many headlines today – even when the stories are actually dealing with relatively minor or moderate levels of problems.

All this has a deep emotional effect that spreads over into our personal lives. If we’re constantly dwelling on terrible events reported in sensational, panicking terms, then we’re going to bring a negative, if not catastrophic lens to how we view our actual lives and our expectations for what’s possible or likely. This is known as the “availability heuristic” – essentially, our brains draw on information that’s readily available to us. So if we’ve been reading a lot about shark sightings or terrorist attacks, we’ll worry more about these than about, say, car crashes, which are statistically a much higher risk but very underreported in news.

And when it comes to doomerism, Gen-z have been dealt a poor hand. They’re coming into adulthood with this media environment as their main experience of what the greater world is: constant bad news, framed with exaggeration and hyperbole, while misinformation spreads rapidly and facts and truth are more questioned than ever.

But doom doesn’t have to be expressed solely in bleak, dark iterations– it’s also taken on more comedic tones. In the aftermath of World War Two, the theatre of the absurd gained momentum through playwrights and thinkers like Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus. It’s this same philosophy that drives Rick and Morty’s Rick Sanchez in Rick and Morty, whose genius and cosmic awareness makes him highly aware of the meaninglessness and randomness of so much of life. When Morty is thrown into the VR video game Roy at Blipz ‘n’ Chipz, he experiences an entire life, well-lived – condensed into a two minute montage with a tragic ending – but then this is immediately forgotten about. It just happened. Rick and Morty explores a multiverse with endless different versions of the characters, underlining just how un-special our particular existence may be. We can see the multiverse concept connected to an absurdist stance in other popular culture like Umbrella Academy. There the titular superheroes travel through time and space to prevent an oncoming apocalypse, and in doing so they become cult leaders, start relationships with mannequins, or live on the moon. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once also has an apocalyptic threat hanging over protagonist Evelyn as she encounters versions of herself in multiple universes. But while this perspective almost makes the characters nihilistic, in the end, knowledge of all these other potential scenarios makes Evelyn appreciate the one she’s been born into, despite its stresses and less than glamorous aspects.

Even stories that feel more grounded in our current reality lean into the ridiculousness of it. Don’t Look Up, a not-so-loose satire of how the world has buried their heads in the sand over the climate crisis, plays the bizarrely inadequate responses of the government, media and tech industry for dark humor – the kind of thing you would laugh at if the absurdity weren’t so accurate. Whether films and shows give us zany, unhinged multiple universes, or make comedy of a post-apocalyptic version of our world, they point out how, in the face of a doom, humans often maintain a strange veneer of normalcy, mundanity or shutting off. But while the humor in these portrayals offers an aspect of comfort or coping mechanism, they’re also infused with a strong streak of despair. So maybe it’s time to lean into that earnestness underneath the disaffection – to let ourselves feel how much we do care and want to strive to make things work out better.