"These are the end-times. Our entire lives have been ravaged by politicians who don't care and a society that is unable to do anything about it. If not one issue, it's another: Climate change, taxation, social tension, exploitation of workers and of people, the inability to discern truth from lie, and the isolation that we all feel constantly in what's said to be the best society on Earth. We the people are either too brainwashed to see the problems, or recognize them and know there's nothing we can do to stop the machines that slowly chip away at our lives and our future as a species. Even with all the action in the world, our work would get crushed or ignored by most and never amount to real change. It's time to give up and accept our reality, our end."
~Some doomer, probably
The rise of the "doomer" is fairly recent to popular audiences, but it was originally formed by Fascists and White Supremacists online who had been "blackpilled" (a phenomenon where a person realizes that there is no hope for them or their society to improve.) However, "doomer"s introduction to a more mainstream audience has taken this meaning and divorced it from the goals/ideology of its creators, creating a nebulous form to describe a person who is negative to a point of thinking that everything is pointless and action to improve is no longer worth it.
I think it's no coincidence that the term "doomer" has been gaining slightly more traction as both a meme and self identifier during the COVID epidemic. Overexposure by means of being isolated and almost contractually bound to social media/news covering the virus has made a lot of people feel as though there's nothing to be done. In our isolation, we feel hopeless, and the onslaught of negative rhetoric fills our minds and destroys an understanding where there could be an end in sight.
Enter the Sanders campaign. As soon as primary results started coming in and showed him not winning, many Sanders supporters started to assume the "doomer" ideology. Rather than working to strengthen the movement or to recruit more voters to a Sanders ballet, they chose to give up.
In both the case of Bernie and COVID, we see how the "doomer" ideology can come to fruition. When pairing the isolating nature of modern society (only amplified by COVID,) the over-indulgence of information that is usually negative, and seeing how efforts are continuously failing, it's easy to see how one can become hopeless and see activism as pointless.
With COVID, we have extreme social isolation, a constant news feed talking about how people are dying and how governments are failing, and we all feel an obligation to be consuming said news and social media. Sanders shows us "doomer" ideology through political activism; once happy and accepting challenges, when faced with so many obstacles and finally seeming to have the nail in the coffin makes people want to through in the towel. People adored Bernie and his policies and saw the efforts against him. Seeing him fail made supporters simply give up out of despair; their society will never be fixed, and future action will be hopeless.
With the understanding of "doomers" and how they come to fruition, the question arises: are they right, if not how do we help them?
One issue that arises with the first question is simply this: even if it is hopeless, fighting is still a preferable option. On one hand, we have no real evidence that collective action and activism would not work, and even if we did dying while fighting for our cause will be more honorable than giving up.
Helping the "doomer" is a more complicated question. We should encourage activism, even in the face of hopelessness of course, but we also need to prevent new "doomers" from being made. I think a major way to combat the spread of "doomer" ideology is by limiting our influx of news and social media. In overindulgence, these two services both serve to isolate us and to overwhelm us with information that can lead to a negative outlook.
I admit more research into the "doomer" is needed to truly come up with a way to help them and to prevent new ones from being made, but it does seem that limitations on our isolation and stream of negative influences would lead to less "doomers" in our future.
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