You know, I never understood how people comment things like this. The world is messed up, but there is always hope for change, for betterment, for there to be a fresh start in the morning.
Comments like this just released into this kind of depressing echo chamber just spread negativity and hopelessness that is not needed in the world today.
I think these posts have a way of propagating doomer-think in a way that almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all collectively assume good will never win so we don’t do anything, so good doesn’t win, but then we collectively at least feel smug and perceptive.
For all of us, but I think especially for younger generations, it’s hard to see any “wins” from the side of good, so it’s tempting and almost comfortable to just make sardonic memes and embrace depressive nihilism. We’ve been conditioned to helplessness.
We laud cynical storytelling about selfish horrible people because it’s “realistic”. We meme about mass-extinction. We see boring-cyberpunk dystopias as our inevitable near future. We doomscroll about each and every terrible rotten thing that happens on every square inch of the planet that we can’t do anything about and believe it’s our fault.
But we gotta combat this with hope if there’s any possibility for a brighter future.
I’m just gonna leave this here. It’s profound and I think of it every day to keep going:
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
Look around. The world has been ending for a long time. Just because it hasn’t been for you doesn’t mean the apocalypse isn’t already here for many people or even most.
This is what I’m talking about though, this pessimistic attitude of we’re already at the end, “O woe is humanity, we’re finished, there’s no point in trying to help! Lets just all wallow in our own self misery and not try to find a better way.”
This is why it’s exhausting to try and get anything done to try and better the world.
I wish I could only selectively see the seemingly fewer and fewer good things in life, but I’ve lived long enough to see how far downhill we’ve gone over the past handful of decades. It’s made even more depressing by the fact of having seen the root cause (mostly aggressive manipulation by the right wing eaten up by selfish masses) of what was an upward trajectory turned to shit needlessly in order to serve as a scoreboard to a pissing match for the ultra-domineering control freaks.
Even if climate change doesn’t make human life completely unbearable for humans on what’s left of the planet, it’s going to take too long to rebalance our living circumstances to see much hope for a good future for the masses. Especially as those at the top work so vociferously against the common interest.
You know, I never understood how people comment things like this. The world is messed up, but there is always hope for change, for betterment, for there to be a fresh start in the morning.
Comments like this just released into this kind of depressing echo chamber just spread negativity and hopelessness that is not needed in the world today.
Thanks for saying this.
I think these posts have a way of propagating doomer-think in a way that almost creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all collectively assume good will never win so we don’t do anything, so good doesn’t win, but then we collectively at least feel smug and perceptive.
For all of us, but I think especially for younger generations, it’s hard to see any “wins” from the side of good, so it’s tempting and almost comfortable to just make sardonic memes and embrace depressive nihilism. We’ve been conditioned to helplessness.
We laud cynical storytelling about selfish horrible people because it’s “realistic”. We meme about mass-extinction. We see boring-cyberpunk dystopias as our inevitable near future. We doomscroll about each and every terrible rotten thing that happens on every square inch of the planet that we can’t do anything about and believe it’s our fault.
But we gotta combat this with hope if there’s any possibility for a brighter future.
I’m just gonna leave this here. It’s profound and I think of it every day to keep going:
–Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers (film version)
That quote always fills me with hope. Thanks for reminding me of it
Is there hope? You are saying it but I’m not seeing any
Look around. The world has been ending for a long time. Just because it hasn’t been for you doesn’t mean the apocalypse isn’t already here for many people or even most.
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This is what I’m talking about though, this pessimistic attitude of we’re already at the end, “O woe is humanity, we’re finished, there’s no point in trying to help! Lets just all wallow in our own self misery and not try to find a better way.”
This is why it’s exhausting to try and get anything done to try and better the world.
I wish I could only selectively see the seemingly fewer and fewer good things in life, but I’ve lived long enough to see how far downhill we’ve gone over the past handful of decades. It’s made even more depressing by the fact of having seen the root cause (mostly aggressive manipulation by the right wing eaten up by selfish masses) of what was an upward trajectory turned to shit needlessly in order to serve as a scoreboard to a pissing match for the ultra-domineering control freaks.
Even if climate change doesn’t make human life completely unbearable for humans on what’s left of the planet, it’s going to take too long to rebalance our living circumstances to see much hope for a good future for the masses. Especially as those at the top work so vociferously against the common interest.