Revised 6 July 2023 to reflect revisions made to an article quoted herein.
In a previous article on the idea of logging off, I wrote:
I generally agree with the injunction against silence, as long as we understand that not everybody is equally able to make their views loud and clear at all times and in all contexts. And I wholeheartedly agree that we generally have a duty to be aware of the state of the world. Complete and willful ignorance is indefensible. On the other hand, dutifully following the news can easily devolve into feeling compelled to feel bad all the time about everything. This can happen no matter where you get your news, but it seems especially likely to happen if all your news is filtered through a few layers of doomerish online discourse. It happened to me, at least.
I don’t believe, however, that this is just a function of my own idiosyncratic spiritual situation, so I don’t think I’m entirely stating the obvious when I say that no one has a duty to feel bad all the time. For one, feeling bad all the time, especially in an age of widespread reflexive impotence—a belief whose adherents “know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it”—can easily come to feel like a sufficient substitute for real action. I have spent, and continue to spend, protracted amounts of time thinking about the global descent into authoritarianism and the various ecological and biological catastrophes I can count on witnessing before my fortieth birthday. None of these things appear to have gone away.
If you need further evidence that my writing has had no impact whatsoever outside of a small circle of five or six friends and family members (albeit devoted ones!), look no further than the average newspaper’s op-ed page. (I will not mention any writers by name; you have to get a premium subscription for that.1) At least twice a week, I see op-eds written according to what we might call the Doomer Op-Ed Template:
Here is a really, really horrible thing that is either happening right now or could definitely happen in the not-so-distant future.
Here is a mountain of evidence detailing:
How truly horrible this horrible, horrible thing is.
How truly screwed we will be when—not if—this horrible thing comes to pass.
Can it be solved? Yes, technically, it could, in the same way that scientists could technically figure out how to make pigs fly or turn the moon into green cheese.
At this point, the writer might turn to the question of whether you, personally, can do anything about it. They will go one of two ways:
A list of three or four token things you can do that will have little real impact beyond making you feel mildly better about yourself (e.g., writing a strongly worded letter to your congressman, who—and this, I grant you, is nothing to sneeze at—may even go so far as to send you a form letter thanking you for your correspondence!)
No, there is absolutely nothing you can do. Lock your doors and load your gun. Make sure you have enough ammunition, liquor, and nonperishable food to get you through the Tribulation. May God have mercy on your soul.
Good luck with your new subclinical anxiety disorder!
I’ve been pretty good about avoiding these articles, but every so often, the urge to click is irresistible; headline writers’ cunning should never be underestimated. I don’t know why I bother—my reaction after reading the first hundred-ish words is, What’s the point of any of this? Almost immediately, I answer my own question: Making the reader feel just as depressed as the writer is.
Why, then, do these articles keep getting published? The cynical explanation is that it gets the kinds of clicks, comments, and shares that advertisers like to see. But such an explanation only gets us about fifty percent of the way there: it doesn’t account for how feeling bad, in and of itself, can sometimes seem like a form of action.
It is, however, my profound regret to inform you that feeling bad is not a form of action. Feeling really, really bad is also not a form of action. Feeling really, really bad all the time about everything and everyone, to the point where you are unable to imagine a future—in a word, depression—is not only not a form of action, it is a consistent practice of inaction, for stasis and sameness are the essence of depression. As Brandy Jensen has described it, “You know how you will feel tomorrow because it’s how you felt today and yesterday. And in this way, depression functions like a habit.”2 If I know that things are bad today, it becomes perversely comforting to know that they will be just as bad tomorrow as they were today. I know what the rest of my life will look like: I’ll stand among and watch the end of man.3 All that easy predictability disappears if I take the real risk of trying to work to make things better. If I do nothing, things are certain to get worse; if I do something substantive, things might still get worse, but they also might get better.
To give a concrete example from my own life: a few months ago, I had the opportunity to show support for an organization whose values align with my own. It was the easiest thing in the world: all I had to do was attend a meeting of a legislative body. There was no risk of arrest or even public shaming, and my schedule was basically free that evening. The meeting itself was a ten-minute drive from my house. But I didn’t go. What difference will it make, I thought; they’re never going to change their minds about this. I watched a live stream of the event and convinced myself that this was a sufficient substitute. It wasn’t.
I do not say this to expiate my lack of action or to beg for forgiveness. I say it only to establish my credibility, for the lack of a better word. I don’t personally know any authors of doomer op-eds and am not qualified to judge their character. I am, however, part of the demographic to which doomer op-eds are targeted: people who believe quite strongly that things are bad and would like very much for things to stop being bad, but who have grown accustomed to the easy depressive predictability of standing on the sidelines watching things stay bad. I don’t know why the authors of doomer op-eds keep writing them. But I have a pretty good idea of why people keep reading them.
I said earlier that the author’s purpose in writing these op-eds is to make the reader feel just as depressed as the author is. It might be that this is also why they keep getting published. Sure, they keep getting published because they drive up engagement statistics, but this doesn’t answer the question of why people click on them in the first place—why they are so engaging in spite of their uniformly gloomy outlook. They get engagement because they give sanction to the belief that feeling bad is a form of action. Put differently, they give the reader permission to do nothing. They give the reader permission to keep standing among and watching the end of man just like they did yesterday, and the day before that, and the year before that. (I hope I need not mention that this serves the needs of power quite nicely.)
Yet even if the doomer op-eds themselves are unsalvageable, this is not true of all of their authors. In their better moments, some of these authors take the time to highlight and amplify the voices of people and organizations who are actually trying to change things. An op-ed page where these simple acts are a regular feature, rather than an occasional garnish, is one I’d like to see. A talent for describing the meanness of the world has its uses, no doubt. Yet if it is only applied towards driving up engagement statistics, it is worse than useless.
Legal disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity.
By “premium subscription,” I mean “Venmo me $5 because I haven’t set up premium subscriptions.”
Brandy Jensen, “Have I been using my depression as a crutch?” The Outline, December 9, 2019, https://theoutline.com/post/8408/ask-a-fuck-up-depression-crutch.
I am grateful to William Faulkner for this particular framing (see https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1949/faulkner/speech/.)