Is The World Ending, or Are You Mentally Ill?

And is your latest prophecy of collapse one of many apocalyptic cans you’ve kicked?

You don’t see this stuff quite as often as you might have in 2020 or 2021 (although recent events re: Iran are kicking it up again) but every now and then I’ll see someone (sometimes even *scary music* in real life!) casually mention that humanity doesn’t have long left, or at the very least, that the world is steadily getting worse in every possible way, so any efforts to make your life better or plan for the future are futile. They will discourage having kids, buying a home, saving money, or doing anything that assumes a tomorrow will exist. Since this weekend, I’m seeing a big uptick in this behavior, but the phenomenon is nothing new.

This type of sentiment usually comes from left-wing types who many of us would consider “doomers,” although they often don’t use that term to describe themselves, because it implies that they are generally obsessed with disaster instead of uniquely informed about the impending disaster du jour. You can find plenty of them on Twitter, but they’re even more concentrated in subreddits like r/collapse, and occasionally you meet one in real life.

Typically, they are kicking some kind of apocalyptic can down the road, often indefinitely. As soon as one horrible prophecy fails to come true, they will either insist it did come true but is being hidden, or simply move onto a different prophecy. I recall bookmarking a tweet in 2020 that confidently predicted that the state of Arizona would be completely uninhabitable by 2025 (I guess they still have six months left for that to happen.) Their predictions usually come from a nugget of truth that has been blown wildly out of proportion, and pointing out the absurdity is often met with accusations of not caring about the real thing. For example, climate change is real, but people will continue to live in Phoenix for a long time—however, if you tell these people you believe homes in Arizona will still be inhabited for the rest of the year, they’ll accuse you of climate change denialism.

From Reddit

Not to armchair-diagnose, but as someone who fell into this trap a few years ago (and who has diagnosed OCD) many of these people are probably depressed or suffering from an anxiety disorder, but lack the insight or tools to identify it as such.