Doomy titles, those grim little prophecies scattered across the scrollable wasteland of social media such as “It’s over” “The end is near” “We’re cooked” "This country is done".
These are not messages; they are emotional tripwires, engineered in the same factories of attention where clickbait is synthesized like a psychic plastic.
The culture has learned something very old and very potent: fear is the most efficient solvent of attention. Long before corporate news and controlled algorithms, sub-optimal priests and kings understood that if they can convince people the sky is falling, they can rearrange the ground beneath their feet.
So these titles of DOOM are not simply expressions of anxiety; they are performances of apocalypse, stitched together by the technosphere to keep the mind oscillating between dread and distraction. They turn the vast, living complexity of the human predicament into bumper-sticker eschatology.
And here’s the irony: in darker times, hue-woman-anity has always believed it was standing on the brink. Every generation, from the ancient Maya to the medieval mystics to the wanna be cyberpunks of Silicon Valley, has cried out, “We’re cooked!” It’s not only a way of trying to deal with death, which is not an end, but also a reflection of the shallow canyons of the co-opted and narrow mind.
The real danger is not that we’re cooked, but that we begin to internalize these slogans as cosmological truths. If one repeats doom enough times, the psyche begins to treat it as destiny — and that is a profound miscalculation of the creative, adaptive, myth-making power of the human mind.
When you encounter these bleak proclamations, treat them as signals, yes, but not as verdicts. Listen, but do not bow. Ask yourself: Is this a genuine insight, or merely the cultural machine playing its favorite chord — the minor key of panic?
Because the future is not a fixed script delivered in a headline. It is a garden, and gardeners know the seasons and natural cycles: experimenting, cultivating, and imagining the next blooming.