Recently, a few bloggers and I talked a bit about “doom-pill content” and generally, we came to the conclusion that writing content about an impending crisis brings us no joy and that one should write content for oneself and not for one’s readers. Today I wanted to get into the “Why”s and “What”s of Doom-Pill Content and essentially just talk about how lately my usually well-curated Twitter-Feed has turned into a relatively bad place for me personally.
Content Warning: I mostly talk about the concept of Doom-Pilling today but I’ll also have a few sections that are “crossed out” that get political… So, be aware. There is a touch of political stuff in here and it’s mostly there as an example for drafts I’ve saved and didn’t publish – as well as examples for things that are bad for one’s headspace.
The concept of the “Doom-Pill” is something that has been around for ages and is most likely a Red/Blue-Pill reference that got changed into people “doom-pilling” themselves and giving up on the world. The “Doom Pill” describes extreme pessimism and/or fatalism that specific individuals, here titled as “Doomers”, share, often believing that these problems will bring out human extinction. When I say “these problems”, I mean topics such as politics, corruption, economical problems, wars, refugees, global warming, pollution, climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, etc. – So, there’s a wide range of topics that are incredibly tiring to listen to, frankly, when you’re not a doomer.
“Doom-Pill” content is content about such topics. People declaring that they’re giving up on the world or America or Germany or whatever is a bit of a problem. It’s people vocalizing doubts and spreading fear and fatalism, essentially, that causes social networks like Twitter to become more and more draining for some people. And while it gets you lots of clicks it also brings you no joy at all. If you blog for a living, it will be lucrative – but at the same time, it’s incredibly tiring in my opinion… and while I have at least twenty posts by now sitting in the drafts about political scandals, rising living costs, the inflation, global warming, and all sorts of bad things happening in the world… I don’t wanna publish any of them. It’s hard to not swear in a rant-post about friggin’ Scholz, Germany’s chancellor who wrote “Klimakanzler” onto his political campaign but still hasn’t done shit to justify that title. I could rant in five posts about our chancellor here in Germany. The man, Olaf Scholz, “forgot” about the WireCard scandal that he profited a lot from. Scholz is late to deliver weapons to Ukraine while promising to do so. Scholz is breaking a climate treaty (again, “Klimakanzler”) at the moment by buying gas and oil from Russia… all the while promising to fight Russia… while funding Russia’s war… Scholz is part of the reason why food is so expensive at the moment. Sorry, I slipped up there and ended up writing doom-pill content.
It’s easy to push out a post like that and write about the bad stuff in the world and it’s incredibly hard to stop myself from doing so. Doom-Pill content isn’t fun to write. As others said, it brings me no joy at all either. It’s horrible and nobody likes it… but a lot of people click on it… so you feel validated when you push out articles and posts like that, at least in my experience. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of doom-pill content on Twitter. It’s bad. I decided to deactivate Retweets for some people while they Retweet all these “I give up on America” tweets. It’s not that I’m saying that people can’t voice these concerns and opinions. In fact, I’m all for it! I just dislike it when people don’t mention it in the CWs/TWs and then that tweet shows up even though you muted the topic… Or sometimes, people censor trigger warnings… and sometimes, you just don’t have the spoons for it and it still shows up and you realize that America still isn’t getting their shit together and that the United States values guns more than people’s human lives and their rights to decide what happens to their bodies or that they’re returning to the middle-ages at this point.
I don’t know. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t mind some political stuff but lately, it’s just gotten way too extreme, especially with the US stuff going on at the moment. Being vocal about things is great but hearing it non-stop and hearing the excessive fatalism and negativity from people just kinda destroys my headspace. Hence, I find doom-pill content horrible and it sucks especially as people seemingly dodge any word filters you set up with ease. Writing that content is not something I wanna do as it brings me no joy. For a while, I may retreat from Twitter and let it blow over or I’ll mute retweets by people for a while until they stop retweeting all those news headers and doomer tweets and even the attempts of joking about it. When it comes to blogs, I can just skip a post if I’m not interested in the topic but I’d love it if there was a content warning at the beginning of the post. When I talk about politics, I try to at least talk briefly about the topics I wanna address at the beginning, so that people that want to nope out can decide to do so before reading about it.
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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