OK, Doomer
Giving up is a luxury we can’t afford
In recent years, I’ve watched a distressing mindset take hold, especially among my pals on the left: despair as a badge of honor. For some, “hope” isn’t a virtue—it’s naïveté. The only acceptable hope, they’ll tell you, is the hope of going first when the tanks roll in and the oceans rise.
This despair-as-virtue mindset—common enough to earn the label doomerism—says things are only getting worse, solutions are impossible, and being deeply bummed out is the only reasonable response to our time.
I’ll take “naïveté” over that. Not because it’s more fun, but because hopelessness is not wisdom. It’s a virus that spreads. It’s a virus that kills solutions and progress. And it’s a virus that’s killing our kids.
In his excellent piece on this topic, “Why are young liberals so depressed?” Matthew Yglesias says there’s a troubling tendency among progressives to “valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment.” If you can’t see why this is a problem, he spells it out: “The thing about depression,” he observes in his usual wry way, “is that it’s bad.” Not just personally harmful, which is bad enough, but harmful to our future. Our children.
The false virtue of performative despair
The data suggest something worrisome is happening with young people’s mental health. A study by Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, and Keyes found that liberal girls experience the highest increase in depressive affect, while conservative boys have the least. But notably, liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls. Political ideology, says Yglesias, appears to play an independent role beyond gender differences.
The authors of this study say that liberal teens might be depressed because they are just accurately perceiving injustice in the world. They catalog a litany of woes: climate change, school shootings, structural racism, police violence, pervasive sexism, socioeconomic inequality. But as Yglesias points out, this explanation sounds less like an objective set of facts and more like “listening to a depressed liberal give an account of recent American politics.”
It’s not that structural racism and other injustices aren’t happening! They certainly are. But bad things aren’t the only things that are happening, and bad things aren’t guaranteed to be permanent. We got through World War II, the Black Plague, and this really dire event, and here we are.
The depressed brain lies
The fundamental mistake here (and it’s one I certainly participated in before realizing how harmful it was), is treating depression as a reasonable or even virtuous response to problems, rather than recognizing it as a cognitive distortion that hinders effective action. Depression is characterized by mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin. Having experienced it myself, I know that your brain lies to you when you’re depressed—but it feels very real when you’re in it. It feels like you are experiencing the world more clearly than those without depression. And so it is with doomerism.
It’s a self-fulfilling trap. Teaching young people that being depressed represents moral clarity or political commitment is harmful to them, first of all. And as a strategy to win over young people so they vote for your side and help you win elections, repeating “everything sucks and will never get better” is also a very bad move. In that it’s definitely not working. (Unless this is all a secret plot by conservatives, who are mopping up political converts—in which case it’s working great!)
When local futilitarianism rules your town
Mason Gaffney, the Georgist economist who lived from 1923-2020, wrote about a specific kind of stuck thinking he called futilitarianism. In his papers “The Economics of Abundance” and “Answer to Futilitarians,” he critiqued the tendency to see every choice as a zero-sum tradeoff—where gains in one area must come at a cost elsewhere. This mindset, traced back to Malthus, makes economics “the dismal science” and politics a series of depressing compromises.
You don’t need to look far to see it in action. Here in Los Alamos, futilitarian thinking keeps us stuck. I hear it all the time—from officials, staff, and even neighbors. Downtown decay, unaffordable housing, fatal car crashes—they’re spoken of not as policy failures but as natural phenomena. “It’s just how things are.”
Faced with problems ranging from fragile infrastructure to dangerous roadways to falling-apart housing, the official response is often preemptive defeat: Geography, “the rules,” or jurisdictional gridlock make real solutions impossible. Even in one of America’s wealthiest counties, with extraordinary resources, we act like our hands are tied. Like rules, which humans wrote, can never be rewritten.
After the September 2024 crash that killed a former Lab director on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road, a local official told me such crashes were unavoidable. It’s individual behavior to blame, which no system can change. What’s more, any solutions to try to fix it would be too hard on society: crashes are simply “the cost of commerce.” That fatalism isn’t a one-off, either. From regular residents to Lab leaders, I’ve heard the same logic of defeat again and again: Sure, it’s a problem, but it is just unfortunately unsolvable. Very sad, moving on now.
When I suggest (which I do, often!) that we in fact have room to maneuver—like implementing well-understood Vision Zero principles on road safety or instituting tested regulatory reform to promote housing—the response is borderline panic. “The people will not allow that,” they whisper, like I’ve proposed burning down the town.
Local doomerism is no less damaging than paralytic despair at the state of national politics or climate change. When we treat constraints as destiny rather than design challenges, we guarantee nothing gets fixed. I propose that we don’t need more studies, we don’t need finger-pointing, and we don’t need officials to recite lists of obstacles. We need a different mindset—one that sees possibility instead of paralysis.
Rescuing policy from resignation
Beyond its personal harm, especially to young people, doomerism carries significant political costs. As Yglesias says, “If you look at the people who’ve led effective movements for social change, they never come close to cultivating this kind of doomer mindset.”
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t declare the civil rights movement hopeless in the face of violent opposition; he proclaimed, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Labor organizers didn’t tell workers they were doomed to exploitation; they rallied them with “There is power in a union” and “The people united will never be defeated” … and, of course, “si se puede!”
Imagine trying to rally a movement around “Don’t even bother uniting, y’all—we’re already defeated and everything you do is pointless. No se puede nada nunca más!
These 20th century leaders, working in very difficult times, understood what modern research in psychology tells us: hope mobilizes; despair demobilizes. People don’t fight when they feel helpless and hopeless—there’s literally no point. As one commenter on Yglesias’s article put it (slightly ironically): “I am so tired of people invoking their own fatigue as a winning move in an argument, or as a cudgel to control other people’s behavior.”
Beyond dismal choices
In his Answer to Futilitarians, Gaffney outlines how solving complex social problems often involves rejecting the premise that we must choose between competing values. For example:
We can have both equity and efficiency by untaxing productive activity, like building stuff, while shifting tax to the land itself.
We can create jobs without inflation by stimulating both supply and demand.
We can protect the environment while growing the economy by focusing human activities intensively on appropriate lands.
We can assert common rights to land while strengthening private tenure rights.
Applied to our local context, this means:
We can have housing affordability without sacrificing community character by encouraging the right density in appropriate areas (and by instituting a universal building exemption on property taxes, see the first bullet point above).
We can improve pedestrian safety without harming commerce by redesigning streets with all users in mind.
We can maintain our unique identity while fostering economic vitality through strategic infill development.
We can honor our scientific heritage while diversifying our economic base by building up a little to allow LANL, housing, and retail to share the same footprint downtown.
This approach doesn’t claim that all problems have easy solutions or that trade-offs never exist. Rather, it suggests that many supposed trade-offs are actually false dilemmas created by confused thinking or vested interests.
Reclaiming optimistic problem-solving
The current political moment demands a return to the optimistic problem-solving attitudes that got us through previous crises. Political commentator Ezra Klein, in a conversation with Saikat Chakrabarti and Zephyr Teachout, points toward what this might look like: an “abundance agenda” focused on identifying what we need more of and removing the barriers to getting it.
While Teachout, who was on the show to represent the leftist end of the political spectrum, leaned on the role of concentrated corporate power in creating scarcity, and Chakrabarti talked about the need for mission-driven politics and public financing institutions, both acknowledged the importance of moving beyond a politics of limitation and constraint.
As Chakrabarti said, the most successful periods of economic transformation have involved “pitching a sweeping transformation of the whole economy and then executing at breakneck speed.” People don’t actually like small, cautious ideas, he said. You get more support when you aim high. (Read more about him in this interview with Noah Smith.) This requires leaders who don’t just identify problems but organize society to solve them, capture national attention with visible progress, develop comprehensive plans, and create institutions capable of execution.
What’s a pragmatic alternative to doomerism?
Several principles emerged from the research I did on this:
Identify real problems without catastrophizing them. Recognize challenges clearly without treating them as insurmountable or apocalyptic.
Look for creative syntheses rather than accepting dismal trade-offs. Question the premise that we must sacrifice one good value for another.
Draw inspiration from historical examples of successful problem-solving. Study how past generations overcame challenges that seemed impossible at the time.
Focus on concrete, achievable actions rather than abstract despair. Ask “What can be done?” rather than “Why is everything terrible?”
Cultivate communities of pragmatic optimism. Surround yourself with people committed to solving problems rather than just identifying/admiring them.
Learn to distinguish between healthy concern and unhealthy catastrophizing. The former motivates action; the latter paralyzes it.
Remember that our children are watching and listening. Next time you feel compelled to launch into a despair tirade, think about how you are nudging the next generation toward outcomes you probably don’t want, like voting for authoritarians.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
We have overcome obstacles before
In the end, we face a choice.
We can embrace doomerism—the belief that nothing can be done and despair is the only honest response. It may feel righteous, but it leads to paralysis. It’s the laziest mindset there is: collapse as inevitability, helplessness as identity.
Or we can choose a “practical optimism” mindset: clear-eyed about problems, but committed to solving them. It’s harder! It doesn’t guarantee success! But it’s the only mindset that makes success possible.
As Gaffney writes in Answer to Futilitarians: “Perhaps the harmony came from [George’s] attitude, his problem-solving orientation… Let us adopt the same attitude, and watch our intractable problems fall away.”
In an age of rising despair, especially among young people, I think reclaiming this tradition of practical optimism is not just politically urgent. It’s imperative. And it matters most right here at home, where the choices we make shape how our children—who are our future—will live, act, and hope.
I’ve seen what’s possible when people believe they can fix things. That’s the spirit I want to cultivate in my town, in my work, and in myself.
Let’s make hope more contagious than despair.
Greatly enjoyed this piece. I came across a similar argument recently, albeit through a different disciplinary approach. You might enjoy reading it. The author, John Plotz, is a Victorianist with political side interests and what he and others call ‘B side’ texts, those texts ‘lost’ to readers because other, ‘bigger’ texts get all of the attention. His term for ‘doomerism’ is ‘anticipatory despair’, riffing on Timothy Snyder’s notion of ‘anticipatory obedience’. I do, though, really like ‘Futilitarianism’. Thank you for introducing me to that term.
Here’s a link to Plotz’ short ‘essay’: https://www.publicbooks.org/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendts-antidote-to-anticipatory-despair/
Veni, vidi, vexatus, velcro, vici!
I came, I saw, I was vexed, I stuck around, I conquered.
Your wisdom and that of others is a beacon of hope that is needed. Not all crises are quickly addressed or easily fixed but we have, as human beings, tackled lots of problems over time and come up with answers, insight and/or acceptance.
#3 in Pragmatic Solutions has been an interesting pursuit for me. From my grandparent's journals with WWI-era, Kansas Dust Bowl and New Deal firsthand experiences and lessons, I've seen the living, breathing version of history. The challenges and setbacks have been monumental in our country's relatively short history but so have the advances and improvements.
We build on what we have, we grow on what we face.