Be Like Jane (Coaston)

It’s a question I’ve been asking for a while* here: Why is it people prefer misery? They catastrophize everything. They absurdly exaggerate everything bad. They inductively reason that one outlier instance of something tragic means it’s endemic. They whip up a word salad about some banal things that’s been happening forever and, while perhaps unpleasant, never caused any actual damage that’s going to destroy humanity before the end of the week. Why? It’s not merely a matter of neglect but an active choice. You want everything to be the worst thing ever and the end of humanity.

Jane Coaston calls it “doomerism.“

Being a doomer — believing that the end is nigh, everything is going to go to hell and maybe we are, too — is big right now.

This isn’t a right or left thing ether, although both will no doubt argue their doomerisming is right while the other side’s doomerisming is crazy.

Last year, doomer doctors garnered big numbers on Twitter predicting that every pharmacy in America would close by February 2022 because of Covid (though one doomer, at least, did revisit her prediction). Now there are doomer professors predicting that the end of society is nigh (and getting praise on Reddit for doing so). There are doomers who have embraced nihilism over electoral politics and doomers creating “bug out” kits for when the world ends because of climate change or the Supreme Court. Doomerism is hotter right now than the street outside my apartment, and that street is pretty damn hot.

Ironically, the New York Times offers an editorial today on the end of the world as we know it.

Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a single United States senator, Joe Manchin, to destroy the centerpiece of President Biden’s plans to confront these very problems — roughly $300 billion in tax credits and subsidies aimed at greatly expanding wind, solar, electric car batteries and other clean energy technologies over the next decade. Had it survived, this would have been the single biggest investment Washington had ever made to combat the ravages of a warming climate.

You would think with all those very smart folks on the NYT editorial board, somebody would have responded to the email with, “Well, maybe it’s about Biden’s poorly devised yet expensive plan, about the conflation of global warming and transgender hegemony, the fact that it’s a planetary problem and no matter what the US does, to the damnation of its citizenry, it’s not going to fix the problem if the other industrial nations aren’t on board,” or any of the great many other questions that really need to be addressed to fix this problem. But I digress.

It’s not hard to figure out why we are experiencing a new religion of profound pessimism. For a lot of people, things seem pretty bad right now — whether they’re fearful of Covid or care deeply about abortion rights being taken away, climate change, police brutality or severe restrictions on immigration — and the means by which those bad things might be changed or reversed seem more stuck than ever before. (As if on cue, a global heat emergency descended on us right after the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency overstepped its bounds in creating the Clean Power Plan.)

The issue here is one of cause and effect, which Jane may be confusing. We have problems? Sure, but we’ve always had problems, and most of these aren’t even new problems so much as the same ongoing intransigent social problems that we’ve struggled with for decades or longer. So why now are these problems so overwhelming, so oppressive, so horrible that it’s the end of the world?

But recognizing that things are bad and could get worse is not what I’m talking about. Rather, doomerism luxuriates in the awful, and people seem unable to get enough of it — the equivalent of rubbernecking at a terrible car accident. That horrible news story you saw? That’s what’s going to happen everywhere, probably soon, definitely to you, and here’s a 22-tweet thread about it. Also, the problems of every town and city are evidence of impending catastrophe, which is coming for you and your family, and no, there’s nothing you can do about it. Covid? Monkeypox? Everything is another harbinger of calamity. And actually, people who aren’t doomers are just lying to themselves, pretending we are not all fated to die in a sick, sad world.

Between nihilism and narcissism, and the deeply unfortunate failure of sending children off to school where they’re taught by Oscar Wilde’s cynics, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, we’ve grown a generation of depressed and anxious, angry and failed misfits.  Les Misérables, but without a hero or good music.

So you’re certain you or your lifestyle is over. Your work life, home life, love life, sex life are awful because you’ve made them that way because you hate yourself and everyone else and the only “pleasure” you can muster is misery. And you will argue that this is how it must be and you are very intelligent?

I have found that the best way to spur action is to begin from a place of optimism — a belief that the thing you want really is possible. (That also means having a realistic vision for what life would look like if you got the thing you wanted.) I’ve used optimism to help people around me change their minds on marriage equality and qualified immunity reform, and argued in favor of those ideas because I believe they are good, not because those are the only ideas stopping us from dying in a horrifying cataclysm.

Jane Coaston has made the choice not to succumb to doom, to squander her life wallowing in misery. Instead, she will use her gifts to do something useful to improve our world, recognizing (as any actually thoughtful person must) that there will always be problems, but that the way to make life better is to strive to fix them. Be like Jane, not the doomers.

*A google search of SJ with “misery” shows 433 results. I’m sure they’re not all on this subject, but many are. And they are for a reason. So many of you are so miserable, living in a world of anger and fear, doom and catastrophe, and hating it, yet refusing to stop being miserable.

Imagine waking up and thinking to yourself, what a glorious day! I wonder what wonderful thing will happen to me today? Will I meet a new friend, find love, help someone in need, paint a masterpiece or cure cancer? Who knows?  Can you even imagine such a thing?