the vibes have actually never been better, and i have a general contempt for doomers like the residents of /r/collapse and other weird subreddits like that
i am familiar with okdoomer and i think it’s indicative of the sort of goofy goober shit most doomers have to work themselves up about to even get in the mindset in the first place, which is hyperfixate on anything which validates their priors and ignore the overwhelming body of evidence which contradicts or actively rejects their priors. even people on /r/collapse sometimes complain about how most of what the subreddit does is post poorly sourced suicide-bait and i think okdoomer is the tenuous but logical conclusion of that
in my mind, the resistance is just a common sense thing. active nihilism is dumb and brain poison. you will simply never do anything useful if your starting position is “this doesn’t matter and i don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to make it matter”–in any case this is a completely falsifiable and illogical position. a whole lot of shit does matter even on the margins. 2.9C of climate change is not an academic distinction versus 3C of climate change.
from a practical and crude standpoint, the conclusion of the position is you might as well kill yourself because it’ll never get better–but conspicuously, the vast majority of self-IDed doomers don’t do this and instead continue to do what amounts to malingering in a world they believe is going to eventually be characterized by resource wars, mass famine, and a climate that wants to kill them. that makes no real sense unless you think these are exaggerations, which i think many of them do actually recognize deep down.
from a personal standpoint, engaging in doomerism will just ruin all your relationships–nobody likes to hang around a complete downer.
Yeah, I don’t actively engage in that and try to avoid it, but pathologically I tend to get lost in doubt and dread. This occasionally spirals me in the direction of doom, with or without doing Google searches on climate change.
Admittedly it’s a much less of an issue since I stopped using Reddit so that’s probably got something to do with it. Beehaw has been a godsend.
imo the most productive way to deal with the inherent anxiety is just to do something or be engaged in something, however small–being in an organization you can devote even a few hours to a month is usually a godsend in this regard, whether that’s DSA or Sunrise or Food Not Bombs, or a non-American equivalent to these groups. it’s so, so much harder to default to assuming nothing will get better if you surround yourself with people and groups fighting to make things better
You have a stronger will than I, being able to read all that and (presumably) not go insane in the process. Was there anything in particular that you learned that stuck out to you?
climate change projections are really a CYOA depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be, and there is zero agreement on what remedies should be undertaken as a part of resolving it
virtually all of the reporting you’ve probably ever heard about Columbine is polluted by some degree of mistruth, miscommunication, or lies from the media, the police, or relevant parties with their own agendas
if there’s any justice in the world, Pacific Gas & Electric executives will all be sent to the 9th circle of hell
socialists got pretty wacky when they were allowed to take power throughout the mountain West during the heyday of the Socialist Party of America, and communists even moreso during their brief period of relevance in the eastern corner of Montana
a lot of conservative Americans are very clearly best described as “stupid fascists”, which is to say they are essentially fascist politically but so politically propaganized against that term, politically ignorant, or just plainly stupid that they don’t realize they are essentially fascist. this is probably and currently saving us from an even more developed fascist movement than already exists, but how long it’ll hold is not clear
That sent me on a !!fun!! Wikipedia trip. My favorite was a sniper attack on a substation that DHS alleged might have been an inside job. Also that’s a lot of fires.
My favorite book was The Winners by Fredrik Backman! It felt like a decent conclusion to the trilogy and I really loved living with all the characters again. My second favorite fiction would probably be The Dark Tower, I’m glad to finally have that series wrapped up! I avoided most major spoilers too so it was a satisfying conclusion.
My favorite nonfiction would be I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy narrates her audiobook and that added a lot to the already tragic story.
I couldn’t get into Beloved when I attempted it (I definitely will try it again, though), but I read Song of Solomon this last year and really enjoyed it!
I love history books, so a long history of the Targaryan dynasty written as a history book just really, really hit with me, though I wish he’d write a novella spelling out Saera Targaryan’s story in full.
Shout-out for I’m Glad My Mom Died. It’s incredible how McCurdy captured the feeling of constantly walking on eggshells around an NParent, not knowing what would set them off. Also, fuck Dan Schneider.
i managed to steamroll through it in about a day (combination of no computer + no television) which i don’t recommend as it is a very voluminous book–it’s one of the largest i have in physical form. basically guaranteed you’ll get some value of out of it though if you’ve liked Graeber’s previous work, either as a reference text or as a reading experience (it seems amenable to being used as both).
“x” is seldomly used in Spanish, and “Latinx” isn’t even really pronounceable in Spanish. It’s very clearly been created and pushed by people who don’t even speak Spanish, so it’s perceived as very disingenuous and forced. There are ways to achieve gender neutrality in Spanish in ways that are more fitting to the language, like using “e” ending instead of “a/o”, e.g. latino/latina/latine, amigo/amiga/amigue, etc.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch put his work on my radar. The premise sounded intriguing and I couldn’t put the book down. It led me to Dark Matter, Recursion, Pines, and Abandon, of which only Abandon I opted to quit reading. He went from essentially nobody to me to “Ooo, there’s a new book coming out!” in the span of this year.
My other surprising hit was getting back into reading comic books and diving into Radiant Black and the associated Massive-Verse stories. It felt like a blend of superhero and Power Rangers style storytelling and parts of it felt very unique and interesting to me (how they handle the main character and where the power of Radiant Black is in the comics releasing now is really cool, trying to avoid spoilers!). It also comes across as a more realistic version of the stories that superhero/PR tell where there’s social media and dialogue that comes across as real speech. I think of it akin to Star Trek vs. The Orville, both great but I see the path of how we get from here to the type of world The Orville embodies but the people on Star Trek don’t feel exactly like real people by today’s standard and it seems that much farther out.
commentary for a few of these: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
i… very much do not like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and i feel like i only need this particular passage to illustrate why. what i can appreciate about it is really limited to keeping this serial killer from recessing into history and getting away with his crimes. as an actual book, and as actual text on page, i have a lot of issues with this one! i don’t really like how it’s written so casually; i dislike how it’s presented and the jumbled order of things; i really did not appreciate[^1] the gratuitous detail of how many of the Golden State Killer’s rapes were committed, leading to such just. unbelievable paragraphs as:
Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly.
i think in general, the book reads like a jumble of blogs—and that would be fine if not for the fact that it’s a book and not a jumble of blogs. it’s a book that has been edited, and if this is what they salvaged in editing it, then… yeah. probably should have been kept in drafts overall. this solidified my general dislike of true crime
[^1]: for reasons both publicly decent and personal
even though it’s functionally a true crime book,[^1] White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland is probably the book that sucked me in the most this year. the ultimate story being told here is effectively copaganda—almost definitionally it has to be, since it revolves around the FBI successfully navigating an infamous domestic terror plot from the past few years. but in between that story this book also really goes intimate into how such plots manifest and take form. you get a real sense of the sort of person who would follow through with white supremacist terrorism—and, perhaps indirectly, how many of these people are pushed to act (or hasten how willing they are to act) with the cajoling of the FBI. i’m not sure a book has ever felt like a peek behind the curtain for me without just actively being a political tract in the way this one was
[^1]: and i very much dislike true crime as a genre—looking at you I’ll Be Gone In The Dark
For nonfiction, I’d have to say How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. It’s a memoir of a woman who grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica. Safiya is a poet and she has a beautiful command of language that makes her descriptions lyrical, haunting, or painful as needs be. However, if you generally need content warnings I would highly recommend looking them up for this book because she does not pull any punches.
For fiction, my favorite would probably be Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Storygraph went down in the middle of me writing this lol, will edit the link in later). It’s a lovely fantasy novel set in an alternate Earth where fae are real. You follow a Dryadologist as she works on documenting a rare type of fae while she works on her encyclopaedia of faeries (hence the title lol). I enjoyed being in Emily’s head as she worked through the problems presented to her, and as she interacted with her colleague.
Literature
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