Amerika

Doomerism is both a cop-out and a crutch. Just gripping about how the game is unfair will not make everyone stop exploiting each other and suddenly love their neighbors. You’ll have to do something anyway if you want this year to be any better than last.

Here is an example of what contemptable, whining Doomerism sounds like. Woe is me, pass the 40 oz. OE and the welfare checks!

How bad do things have to get before people start realizing that we are in the midst of a full-blown economic crisis? The “experts” on television are endlessly debating about whether or not we are going to have a “recession” this year, and meanwhile economic activity is imploding all around us. The number of homes being sold in this country each month has already fallen by a third. The number of job cuts in November was 417 percent higher than it was during the same month a year earlier, and at this point even Amazon is laying off thousands of workers. The Federal Reserve has declared war on inflation, but prices continue to spiral out of control. In fact, vegetables are 80 percent more expensive now than they were 12 months ago. Meanwhile, the financial markets continue to plunge. A third of the value of the Nasdaq has already been wiped out, and more than two-thirds of the value of all cryptocurrencies is already gone…

I’ve worked in a field where anecdote in no way equals data. However, a little bit of storytelling very quickly knocks over a house of cards constructed upon disingenuous data. The Economic Collapse Blog began profiteering off of doom prediction back in about 2006. The housing market went Tango-Uniform in 2007/2008.

Since 2006, I’ve successfully bought two different houses on very favorable terms and have nearly tripled my own personal net worth by showing up for work, doing my particular “jerb”, and then behaving in a rational manner with the proceeds of my efforts. That tripling included this year’s excremental performance in both my pension and the kiddos’ college fund.

Well goodie for me! I might have had a good seventeen-year run with one or two bummers included in the data trend. “Good” here is defined as a shade less of 10% return on my income, investments, and tangible possessions per year. That isn’t Doom. I am what boring, unsexy sustainability looks like.

Now Mr. Snyder will give you eleven current reasons of why it’s all unfair, but only total simps and betas ever walked around expecting it to be fair. It won’t ever be fair. The job game. It’s rigged. The university admissions are all rigged against MMC Whitepeebles, so therefore Google, Goldman-Sachs, et al, are not conducting any interviews at any university that would put up with the very mundane presence of a mere schlep like myself.

The mating game is rigged. That’s my own fault for not being born 6′ 3″ tall with six-pack abs and a triangular set of lats that resemble the devil wings from a Black Sabbath album cover. The top 20% or so of guys are going to bang 80% of the ladies. Otherwise, the Internet would not economically survive off of pornography.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were any sort of music or entertainment that wasn’t centered on degenerate Leftism. Develop a taste for Mozart or Bach. The rest of that crap is all rigged. It has been since Sinatra climbed in bed with the mob and became a star by payola. Megan Thee Stallion can’t even spell “the” correctly when picking a performance name. She didn’t achieve stardom by spending hours in her room working through chord progressions or octave scales. Ask her about the Suzuki method, and she’d recommend Harleys instead.

Doomerism is the accelerationist’s wish-fulfillment porn. There are logical reasons to believe our current economy is in a bad place. There are similar reasons to believe our behavior as a species may well be making our planet a less pleasant place. That being said, Michael Snyder and Paul Ehrlich are both filled to the brim with old-fashioned Amish fertilizer.

The point here is that your personal trend only equals the Snyder/Ehrlich Doom Line if you sit around stoned off your rectal orifice listening to Doomerism. I don’t blame or condemn anyone for giving up and listening to huckstering profiteers like these. I feel sadness and empathy instead. Yeah, I had afternoon or two of walking around a downtown area with a stack of resumes nobody felt inclined to read. At least the skyscrapers look really cool. It wasn’t like a I had a prayer of landing a big money job at that particular time.

So what is there to do? There are three sub-optimal options.

1. !DEMAND! that people make it fair. Occupy Wall Street. They’ll feed you some Riot Ribs. You’ll still be alone, broke, disrespected, and unemployable for life.
2. Lounge against the machine. Sign up for every program and make the rest of them support you. In places like Illinois, California, or Massachusetts, this pays better than honest work. But it only keeps you in stasis. It’s like being in The Vegetable Patch on life support.
3. The best you can with what you have. A person has to dig deep and put up with failure to get out of that particular scum-ditch. You take the small money job and fulfill the responsibilities. You date nice and intelligent women without worrying too much about whether they are “10s.” Settle for rational and patient adults that have recognizable goals, ethics, and morals.

Pick out music, TV, video games, and hobbies that don’t reinforce any sort learned helplessness. You can go ahead kill some time and murder a few brain cells. We all do. Just don’t let it dominate and destroy your better opportunities. Get into a school that teaches decent and practical curriculum that will give you a useful skill set. To escape the Doom Loop, you focus on the mirror and ignore the Doom Slingers.

Build yourself to the point where a bunch of the stuff that is “unfair” or “rigged” works for you. Build yourself to the point where Doomsters aren’t even speaking Standard American English as far as you are concerned. This is your life in 2023, not Michael Snyder’s or Paul Ehrlich’s.

So to do better in 2023, do the following: ignore the doomsters. Expect the game to be ridiculously biased against you. Do what maximizes your results against that bias. Anything else involves just the sort of pity-fueled autoeroticism that keeps Ehrlich, Snyder, and the internet rich to each of our detriments.

Tags: doomsters, fatalism