Rational Doomerism
The Song of Jonathan of Patmos
Jonathan is a Zillenial stuck on a rugged rock of life.
Their Boomer parents are aging, conservative, and not attuned to their social needs, wants, or declining station in life. They are downwardly mobile. They are crushed by the immense weight of capitalism, of climate change, or rising religious facism. They are clocking out. They’re lying flat.
Jonathan’s brother and their sister are excelling in life. They have a spouse and a kid and a house and they live exciting lives in Alaska and Florida and California and Maine, but Jonathan is still alone. They live in their parents house, or very close to it, and their significant other broke up with them absolutely annihilating their heart (and often, coming back to annihilate it repeatedly in slipshod fashion).
Jonathan of the Rugged Rock also believes the world is ending.
What if they’re right? This depressed, unemployed, uneducated human has seen into the future through their rectangular palantíri, and correctly figured out, “Actually, we’re all fucked, and humanity is doomed.” What are the rational reasons that they might have? Let’s start as locally and closely as we can, and slowly zoom out:
Jonathan lives in two places simultaneously because their parents got divorced. They live in the American heartland and on the Americans coasts. From both places, they see disaster.
In the American heartland, Jonathan sees a dilapidated manufacturing base and concurrent population collapse. They drive by urban cores stripped of all life (which was exported to China), and entire communities -entire states- succumbing to an opioid epidemic that kills their friends and family. Jonathan is too young to live in places where hope was sucked out- it’s been hopeless since before they were born. They are living in the ruins of a dead civilization.
And if they attempt to escape, its essentially impossible, because the American Coasts are full:
If Jonathan tries to get to the West Coast, or the Megalopolis on the East Coast, they find that one third of the value of any education they get is stripped and used to feed their Boomer landlords. If they are able to eke it out and escape from economic depression into economic mania, they’re at constant risk of being gentrified (or [worse to Jonathan] being the gentrifier). Indeed, when they get to the cities of gold or the cities of old, Jonathan finds that Covid turned Millennial playgrounds into worlds of rising homicides, car thefts, and homelessness. Even worse, like the monster from It Follow, the opioid epidemic has followed them here.
How could it be any worse for Jonathan?
We zoom out. No longer is Jonathan looking at just their local situation, they’re looking at their national situation which is- oh, the Sun Belt is fucked, too.
Johnathan finds that the only area that is balancing economic growth with non-redistributive policies, is also a cultural hell hole. They find their trans friends’ rights under attack, their women friends’ rights under attack, and the attacks are coming from the local, state, and -sometimes- the federal level. Their Targets are under attack! They’re forced to choose between adoring criminals to fit in, or to pay homage to the retreating and underpaid boys in blue.
At this federal level, mass political polarization has made two body politics that are mutually unintelligible to one another. There are no conversations about specific policy, there is no national bandwidth to debate nuanced laws. So, things only happen rarely, because nobody can agree, and if people can agree nothing happens because a Vetocratic system of laws has been set up to make sure it doesn’t.
It’s okay though, because the machine of government can continue: we have a powerful, bureaucratic state that is able to function through pure inertia... even if we know that many organizations have been massively captured by private interest… and these organizations include everything from an FDA that approves dogshit drugs to a military that is unable to procure weapon systems within a timely manner.
Oh, maybe it isn’t okay?
Jonathan doesn’t care about the fact that most of their peers are too fat to fight in the military, or that the quality and capacity of many classic American companies has been hollowed out through irresponsible financialization (they hate companies to begin with). These facts are true, and if you told them, Jonathan would say, “Oh yeah, that sucks too.” They already believe the world is ending.
Jonathan is somewhat aware that they are consuming something like cultural slop. They might not actually be consciously aware of that computer generated slop, they might actually enjoy the slop, but the number of remakes, sequels, and adaptations has numbed them. This numbness is true for Jonathan’s far flung cousins, Jean, Johann, Joens, and Sean. They are aware of that numbness.
And so, they’re numb to the dreams of their parents, to space travel, to megaprojects, to adventure. They swim within a sea of cultural learned helplessness, where the failure to handle Covid is unsurprising, where a significant minority of their friends can’t get laid, and many don’t even try.
They look at their rulers, who are old, gray, demented and dying, and they look down to their heirs and find they’re not there. Jonathan is the Last Human. There are no babies, and this isn’t just true of Jean and Sean, but also Yuēhàn and Yohan and Yohana.
All across the world, Jonathan sees great looming disasters: the collapse of a global trade system, the demographic collapse of any country that reaches above subsistence levels, the collapse of the climate system due to human carbon, and the collapse of democratic rule across the world. Even without these collapses, Jonathan sees an Africa stuck in an economic stall, and middle income countries trapped in the 1950s. Jonathan looks out on the world and sees the Bad Guys are Winning.
Jonathan does not care about future people, but if they did they would be concerned with the rising risk of nuclear war, and the extreme risk of Humanity’s annihilation by Unfriendly AI. They would see trillions and trillions of lives snuffed out before they could even take a breath and it would terrify them.
We zoom back to their room, which is dirty and filled with trash from take out and microwaveable meals. Jonathan is trying to ignore their phone, because they’re anxious about a text from their girlfriend who is having an episode. They’re sitting in front of their Mac watching a documentary about how terrible factory farming is, but they switch it off for the new Marvel TV show on Disney+.
Are we to say to Jonathan of the Rugged Rock, “No, you’re wrong about all of this. Your viewpoint is fucked up and you need to visit a CBT specialist as soon as possible”?
Probably, and we would be correct, but I doubt it will work.