A middle-aged man at the city gates. A worn robe on his back. Eyes burning with something unhinged. And he cries out to the crowd in alarm: “The end is near.”
We have never managed to escape these doomsayers, men who manufacture panic in the service of someone’s interests, not for centuries. And now the situation is worse. They are no longer at the city gates. They are right beside us. The ever-promised “end” is now a phone’s reach away.
The new generation of doomsayers has something the old ones never did: an algorithm that rewards urgency, a platform that converts despair into money, and an audience pre-softened by the very anxieties they are about to amplify.
The Grammar of Catastrophe
They don’t actually say the end is near. That would be falsifiable. There are obstacles, “Publicly Disseminating Misleading Information,” “Crimes Against Public Order.” So instead they say something is very wrong. A formulation so elastic it can never be refuted, because in some corner of the observable universe, something is always very wrong.
“The coin engineer says: The country’s biggest fortunes are selling off their companies one by one. Is there something we don’t know?”
I had written something here about what it is we don’t know, something concerning the doomsayer’s mother. My editor had it removed. I’m not sure. Is it wrong to be aggressive toward creatures that feed on our fears?
Back to the point. What a beautiful sentence structure, isn’t it? An unbelievably sweeping generalization with no details. Which fortunes, exactly? What did they put up for sale? Who bought it? Where did the money go? None of that is present. None of it matters. What matters is that we worry, and that we follow this prophet who can see what’s coming.
You may have noticed: most of these doomsayers run monetized YouTube channels, verified Twitter accounts or paid Substack newsletters. Interesting. Is there something we don’t know?
The economy is “collapsing,” present continuous, no end date. Society is “breaking down,” a participle implying ongoing process but never arrival. The middle class is “disappearing.” Truth is “dying.” Everything load-bearing is perpetually on its way out without ever quite leaving.
Compare this to the grammar of actual analysis. The historian says: between these years, due to these forces, with these consequences, this happened. The economist says: the data shows, the model predicts, the confidence interval is. These sentences are fragile. They can be broken. That fragility is what makes them honest.
Doom content Creators writes in a syntax designed to be unbreakable. Not because it is strong, but because it never quite touches the ground.
The Price of Prophecy
Literature has always had its tragic seer. Cassandra, Tiresias, the ghost of Hamlet’s father. What distinguishes these figures is their cost. Cassandra’s knowledge destroys her. Tiresias pays with his eyes. Hamlet’s father was already a ghost. The prophecy cannot be separated from the wound.
The internet doomsayer pays no such price. They convey the weight of “terrible knowledge” through slow head-shaking and reluctant sighs: “I wish I didn’t have to tell you this…” The only price paid is the time spent in a video editing suite.
If there were a real price to pay, no one would get into this business. They do it because there’s a profit. And that profit has nothing to do with warning us about catastrophe in advance and preventing it. It has to do with farming followers and landing ad deals.
Yes, it’s that simple. That cheap.
Doomscrolling
Modern life produces a genuine, diffuse anxiety, about climate, about institutions, about the future, about whether the life one is living is the right one. This anxiety is real and it is looking for a container. The doom content creator provides a container. They say: your unease has a name, it has a source, and I will tell you what it is, every Tuesday and Thursday, with timestamps in the description.
This is, in its own way, a service. The problem is that the service is structured to perpetuate the condition it claims to address. An audience that has been relieved of anxiety will not return for more. An audience kept at a constant simmer of manageable dread, informed enough to feel sophisticated, alarmed enough to keep scrolling, is a recurring revenue model.
The “end” may not be approaching. But life is still bleak. Our problems are real. And on top of those real problems, hollow anxieties are being stacked.
What Gets Lost
Great literature, even at its most despairing, works against passivity. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is paralyzed and miserable, but the novel does not ask you to agree with him; it asks you to see him, and through seeing him, to see yourself. Camus writes about absurdity not to produce hopelessness but to propose that one can live honestly within it. Even tragedy, in the classical sense, is cathartic. It moves something through you and leaves you altered, not merely confirmed in your worst suspicions.
Doom content does the opposite. It invites you to a condition of informed helplessness: you now know that everything is terrible, which distinguishes you from the others. From the sheep who don’t know. But you are not asked to do anything with this knowledge, only to share it and come back tomorrow. The emotional loop is closed. Nothing escapes it.
To believe that everything is falling apart is, paradoxically, a form of comfort. It means the difficulty you feel in your own life is not a private failure but a symptom of a public catastrophe. Your struggles are not yours; they are the system’s. Your unhappiness is not a question you need to answer; it is evidence in a case that has already been decided.
Paying attention to disaster is bound up with our survival instinct. But exposure to this much bad news erodes that same instinct. We go numb.
This is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Dissolve the individual into the mass. Replace the hard, lonely work of living a particular life with the warm solidarity of a shared diagnosis. You’re not struggling. You’re waking up.
The tragedy is that the anxiety is real. The desire for understanding is real. Something in the culture is genuinely, verifiably wrong in ways that deserve serious attention. All of that is true. But it is being fed into a machine that converts legitimate concern into ambient dread and calls it awareness.
You read that your country is sinking. You believe the headline. You leave a supportive comment without any evidence and keep scrolling. No action. No taking to the streets. No questioning the government. Interesting, isn’t it? You don’t even look into whether it’s true.
Social media is slowly numbing people. And that, genuinely, may be what brings humanity to its end.
The doomsayer pays no price. They’ll post again on Thursday. The collapse, as always, is ongoing. And the ad revenue will land this month too.
You’ll keep watching.
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