Doomers, Nihilism, and Optimistic Nihilism

Sep 21, 2026

It's a rough time to be a human. Large tech companies force-feed us a steady diet of addicting yet divisive media. At the same time, they are racing at breakneck speed towards artificial superintelligence which they genuinely think could kill all of us. The wealth gap is increasing at levels not seen since the Gilded Age, causing 42% of Americans to think it is very likely we will see a total economic collapse in the next 10 years. Global conflict levels have hit their highest levels since WWII. Accelerating climate change is driving deadly heat, floods, wildfires and other severe weather events across the globe. Throughout all of this, our president hosts brain damage fests (read: UFC fights) on the White House Lawn, posts AI slop videos of him as Green Lantern, and has renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. There are a lot of reasons to be distraught, angry, and overwhelmed.

These big, uncomfortable feelings lead to a variety of reactions. Many are logical, but many are also illogical. A rise in a perverted version of nihilism, so-called doomerism, is the most egregious of these illogical reactions. The common popular conception of nihilism goes something like:

However, as the philosopher Keiji Nishitani would argue, this is a very shallow version of nihilism. What does this line of thinking tell us to do? If nothing matters, it seems we should sit around, take drugs, eat junk food, play video games, and generally wither away. Rather than nihilism being a way to deeply examine the world around ourselves and question our base assumption of some karmic world order, it becomes a psychological defense mechanism that insulates us from the hardships of the world so we can bask in comfort.

While most people would agree shallow nihilism is a poor way to live, what about doomerism? These people may look at divisive social media algorithms, echo chambers, and a constant stream of global crises and instead say:

I'm sure we can all think of either a person in our lives that engages in this type of thinking, or moments when we do it ourselves. Maybe you doomscroll on social media about climate disasters and become convinced that emissions targets or recycling are futile. Maybe you begin to withdraw from making friends, dating, or participating in communities because modern socialization is supposedly too fractured to fix. Maybe you view America's current political climate as so corrupt that voting feels meaningless, so you don't educate yourself during election cycles.

This type of all-or-nothing catastrophizing is very similar to Nishitani's idea of shallow nihilism. Underlying all of these assumptions is the idea that our actions don't have meaning, or as the kids would say: "we're cooked." While we can clearly see the flaws in outright nihilism, modern society often subconsciously smuggles doomerism into our collective psyche. If the climate is irreparably damaged, why try to save it? If socialization is too superficial, why try to make friends? If our democracy is gone, why vote? Why engage deeply with the world when you can retreat to a shallow and familiar safety? This way of thinking makes us angry, scared, divided, and bitter such that we turn to the same paralyzing coping mechanisms as the shallow nihilist: sit around, while away the days with meaningless distractions, and be comfortable.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a subconscious cultural cachet associated with doomerism. An idea pervades through social discourse that the more angry and hopeless you are, the more educated you are on the world's troubles. If you don't feel this way all the time, well then surely you are not educated, because how can anyone rational look at the world and not feel like we are doomed?

To an extent, these ideas can be helpful. None of the crises previously mentioned are fake. They are all serious threats to humanity, and it is imperative that more people are aware of them. But ultimately, anger is easy and safe. One need only turn on the news for five minutes to feel deeply angry about any issue they want without thinking about how to fix it. Anger can tell us that something is wrong, but it becomes destructive when we mistake the feeling of anger for the act of doing something about what made us angry. Doomerism and anger become a unique form of avoidance.

This is a surefire way to create a society that is informed about its problems but psychologically paralyzed by them. And surely these people are not the ones galvanizing societal change. The more we succumb to these big, negative feelings, the more we allow the status quo to remain the same and not fight for a better future. By engaging in petty infighting among ourselves, we give the ones driving these crises more breathing room to stay in power.

Instead, imagine giving cultural cachet to hope. Where instead of rewarding the loudest, angriest, and most perverse voices, we rewarded those who soberly acknowledged our problems, and then attempted to solve them. Surely this would result in more positive change? Think about when you have had a big argument with someone, learned a loved one has passed, or broken up with a long-term partner. Do you think that is the right time to, say, rashly quit your job and move somewhere new? While the whimsical may say sure, I think most can agree this isn't very smart. But how many people vote for politicians in a fit of anger from fear mongering on social media or the nightly news? More than we would like to admit. I do it to an extent, and I'm sure you do too.

So far, I've argued to simply "have hope," but you may be wondering how that is possible in the face of the very real crises I've laid out. I think it is important to distinguish hope from optimism. Optimism is a prediction about the future: things will probably get better. Hope is different. Hope does not require us to believe that things will get better, or even that they are likely to get better. It is the decision to continue acting toward a better future despite not knowing whether we will reach it. In this sense, hope is not a rejection of reality, but a willingness to participate in a possibility. Hope frees us from the idea that pessimism is the only intellectual alternative to naïveté.

I would even argue hope isn't a logical reaction, and that is OK. If hope were entirely logical, we wouldn't even need hope. We would simply need to look at the world around us, and the evidence would point us towards positivity. But sometimes, you must fully immerse yourself in a way of thinking in order to properly experience it. For instance, there is no way to trust someone without first being vulnerable enough to put your trust in them, and then find out later if they are trustworthy or not. In the same way, sometimes we have to fully surrender ourselves to the possibility of hope to even see that it is there.

As Sital Sathia wrote in an article about climate change for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "Dear Doomer: Hope is a Discipline". Hope is a practice that we commit ourselves to. It takes seeing a situation of despair, educating yourself on it, then pushing past the anger and deciding to be hopeful. Hope may not be an emotion we can simply summon on command, but we can choose practices that cultivate it.

Nishitani would say this method of finding hope is quite similar to optimistic nihilism. To him, true nihilism is not a passive process of resigning ourselves to meaningless, but an active one of examining the fragility of the fixed societal structures that we subconsciously derive meaning from. If we can disengage from the idea that our cultural institutions are as stable as we think, we may apply this to our own foundational morals. Now imagine we applied this line of thinking to everything. If we truly take nihilism seriously and experientially live it, it can be a liberating tool to allow us to have more immediate, rich, and hopeful experiences without the restraints we think bind us to reality.

We can now craft a similar, but far more hopeful version of nihilism:

Whereas doomerism and shallow nihilism remove all meaning from life, optimistic nihilism allows us to re-inject our own version of meaning. Certainly this places more pressure on us to orchestrate our own lives, but if we get to live entirely on our own terms, why would we not choose hope as something that gives us meaning? We can still become informed about suffering and injustice, but we can meet this suffering with hope. We are freed from the modern societal expectation that education of terrible events should lead to anger and despair. We can practice psychological self-care and make rational, proactive decisions without being clouded by anger. We can work towards change! We can be happy! This is euphoric! This is hopeful!

If this sounds out-of-touch and dismissive of suffering, I understand. As Nishitani would say, we cannot intellectualize our way into this style of living. Much like trust, it must be experienced to be believed. Previous posts on this blog contain all the ways in which my life has collapsed and become filled with suffering, so I won't retread them here, but the crumbling of my societal guardrails and expectations gave me a taste of what Nishitani is talking about. Without these cultural stories to fall back on, I've had to question what drives me to get out of bed each day. It needed to be something much deeper than the normal societal expectations that I could no longer meet. After reaching rock bottom and contemplating suicide, I found that motivation came from a deep place rooted in nihilism and far beneath my ego.

To be clear, this is a major work-in-progress for myself and the philosophical arguments laid out in these essays are ideals I strive towards, not some twisted sense of enlightenment I have achieved. Most days, I grossly fail to live up to these standards. But I regard this way of thinking as my personal philosophy for dealing with by far the most challenging and isolating time in my life. My hope is that others who are not in my same situation can take nuggets from this philosophy and use them to examine their own lives. It's going to take a lot to save the planet, but remember, hope is a discipline. My first concrete recommendation? Leave social media. Sorry.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Comments

Let me know what you thought about this post, especially if you have criticism or want to discuss something further. Sharing ideas is the whole reason I write!

Loading comments…