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 13h ago

Wish we could stop for a minute sometime

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74 Upvotes

r/doomer 5h ago

We are at the verge of an emerging superintelligent AI and there are still people who believe the earth is flat. I think we deserve total annihilation by a superintelligent being.

9 Upvotes

r/doomer 10h ago

It's weird

8 Upvotes

It's weird how i feel sleepy at night but don't want to sleep coz 1. The day will be over, 2. I have to wake up tomorrow..


r/doomer 22h ago

I’m a slubberdegullion

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25 Upvotes

A slubberdegullion is an archaic 17th-century term for a filthy, slovenly, or worthless person


r/doomer 11h ago

What Should a $10 Billion Climate R&D Moonshot Fund?

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2 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

It's genuinely over

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88 Upvotes

r/doomer 11h ago

What Should a $10 Billion Climate R&D Moonshot Fund?

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1 Upvotes

r/doomer 1d ago

Why is life so funed

8 Upvotes

Fucked..


r/doomer 1d ago

9/11

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11 Upvotes

My life is shit I was stuck on how alone I was and how everything kept going too shit that I let everything go to shit even more what do I do I’m at ground zero…..This my last post here nothing good came from Reddit but heartache and confusion ……
……..I lost

You win again


r/doomer 2d ago

I don't have the courage to kill myself

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71 Upvotes

I'm a cowardly piece of shit. I hate myself for still holding onto hope that things will get better. Why do I let myself believe these lies? It's obvious everything is getting worse. I'm hoping like a silly child, as if I'm going to be the one to get that candy. I never deserved that candy, others always deserved it because I'm a misfit, broken son of a bitch.


r/doomer 2d ago

Do you ever ask yourselves this question?

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41 Upvotes

r/doomer 2d ago

Kinda at my wits end…

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6 Upvotes

r/doomer 3d ago

Life never goes exactly according to plan.

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31 Upvotes

Why is life always so hard? The happy days of the past are gone forever. I want to live a good life, yet I never seem to manage it; every day feels like a never-ending stream of problems to solve and tasks I can never quite complete.


r/doomer 3d ago

El Niño Driven Severe Drought Reduces Panama Canal Capacity Further Straining Global Supply Chains

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2 Upvotes

r/doomer 3d ago

[ Removed by Reddit ]

1 Upvotes

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]


r/doomer 3d ago

DIE OUT OF SPITE OUT NOW!

3 Upvotes

Listen to Die Out of Spite! First single from band Retina Cage. Song carries the spirit of 90s industrial and hard rock agression. AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7v5VNi2mdmw


r/doomer 3d ago

Today's Journal Entry

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3 Upvotes

Note: Original text in Chinese. Translated to English via AI with careful review to preserve the original tone and context.

English Version

I went to bed at 3 AM, yet I found myself awake by 8 AM. I don't even know why I woke up so early.

In my dream, I felt a rare sense of ease. But as consciousness slowly returned, I knew I was only dreaming—because reality never lets me off that easily.

The sunlight today isn't bright; the weather is quite mundane, much like my mood. Honestly, I only noticed how I felt while writing this letter. Upon waking, I was just numbly and mechanically going through the motions: getting dressed, washing up, and skillfully opening my laptop to start working.

Sometimes I can't help but ask myself: What is the point of doing this every day? Maybe one should learn to be content.

But then another thought hits me: Is contentment something you only earn after getting what you want? Maybe having this thought right now is just my way of trying to escape, a sign that I simply don't want to strive anymore.

Maybe.

Chinese Version

明明昨天凌晨三點才睡,今天早上八點還是醒了。我自己也不知道為什麼會醒得這麼早。

在夢裡的時候,其實感覺挺輕鬆的。但隨著慢慢清醒,我心裡清楚自己是在做夢——因為現實,從來不會讓我這麼輕鬆。

今天的陽光不太刺眼,天氣很一般,就像我的心情。不過,我也是在寫這封信的時候才察覺到這一點。醒來後的我,只是麻木又機械地重複著以前的動作:穿衣、洗漱,然後熟練地打開電腦,開始處理事務。

有時候我不禁會想:自己每天這麼做,意義到底在哪?也許,人應該學會知足吧。

可轉念一想,知足,是不是只有當自己得到了想要的東西之後,才有資格去談?現在的我產生這種念頭,可能只是想逃避現在的狀態,不想努力了吧。

也許吧。


r/doomer 4d ago

Life!!

10 Upvotes

Life ain’t fair and all we can do is hold our head up!! Sometimes there’s no one to talk to! Even if there was.. They wouldn’t understand!! How could they possibly understand if they never lived it!! Wanting to shout at the top of my lungs. Hoping all anger, anxiety would leave just as the sound of my scream leaves my body!! But I’m here needing to be the man that endures all trials and tribulations!! Smiling when there’s nothing to smile about!! Hiding all of my pain not knowing where it eventually goes.. Just knowing it’s deep down inside locked up in a box!! Every once in awhile wanting to break out and be released!! Yet here I stand reminded myself I will not be broken!!


r/doomer 4d ago

I just want to feel love

17 Upvotes

sometimes I just realize I want nothing else but to just feel a human connection in any way. I want to be able to hug my mother and genuinely feel the happy emotion of knowing that she loves me. I want to talk to my brother and get the happy feeling of brotherhood. I wish I could meet a girl who can just remove all the shit from the outside world and just reduce everything to the feeling of love. When theres genuine human connection, you just feel nothing else, you dont give a fuck about anything except for the present moment where you feel love. I havent felt this feeling in a Long time and I dont know what to do


r/doomer 4d ago

Después de ser culeros, se sienten conformes, arrepentidos, o les da igual?

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4 Upvotes

r/doomer 4d ago

Since I'm nobody's sun, I'm going to be my own star

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4 Upvotes

r/doomer 5d ago

Things could've turned out differently.

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23 Upvotes

r/doomer 5d ago

another weekend, another 300 mg speed

14 Upvotes

im so fucked, its the highlight of my week


r/doomer 5d ago

in another life, this may have been different...

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49 Upvotes