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Doomer or Realist?
The fear of truth will not change the future, except for the worse.
I’ve been accused of being a doomer more times than I can count. It happens whenever I lay out the ugly, unvarnished reality of where we’re headed.
Climate catastrophe.
Economic collapse.
Authoritarian backsliding.
I get it. It’s easier to slap a dismissive label on someone than it is to accept that they might be right. That we might, in fact, be standing on the precipice of something truly irreversible.
But let’s be honest. Are we really talking about “doomerism,” or is this just realism wearing a less palatable face? After all, hope is a seductive drug. It lulls us into believing that “someone, somewhere” is handling things. That billionaires, politicians, or green tech geniuses will swoop in at the last moment with a miraculous fix. That everything will, somehow, work itself out.
It won’t.
We are past the point of minor course corrections. The global polycrisis — global problems ranging across economic instability, climate disaster, biodiversity loss, political extremism, and societal fracture — is accelerating. And while the affluent among us may still feel a sense of security, the cracks are already visible.