The Roots of Collapse, Part 2: High Negative Messaging and Doomerism

Doom is not depth, and awareness is not an endless scroll of despair.

Apocalyptic collapse feels inevitable because we’re drowning in a flood of negative messaging. We are daily bombarded with constant, vague, apocalyptic doomerism that feels like truth but is actually collapse fuel. For some, this feels like sophisticated critique. But it’s really a neurological weapon aimed directly at our capacity for resilience and change.

We must understand the critical distinction between strategic, systems-level critique and awareness, and emotional flooding with no specificity or path forward. The former sparks change and prepares the nervous system for it, while the latter actually shuts down cognition.

Why Despair Feels “Smart”

We have a population absolutely addicted to high-volume outrage, despair, and cynicism. This addiction is dangerous because it provides the ego with a cheap illusion of intelligence and moral clarity. It is fueled and compounded by social media algorithms and doomscrolling. This is not an accident. It is design.

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom. Saying, “it’s all over, the elites control everything,” sounds jaded and intelligent. It allows you to act like you see more than anyone else, like you see through the system, without ever actually having to do anything smart. You still get to feel smart, but without the risk or effort of strategy. It also protects the ego. If you declare the game is impossibly rigged beyond changing before you even try to play at shifting it, you never have to risk losing at it. You never have to face uncertainty, failure, or being wrong when the stakes are now the highest they’ve ever been. Despair is passive at best, gangrenous at worst. I am not saying that the game isn’t rigged. It is. If you’ve read anything I have written before now, you will have noted that this is a core theme in my discussions around the constructs and illusions of our shared reality. Seeing through that is part of the path forward.

But my point is that there is a difference between system critique and the algorithm of surrender. There’s a difference between seeing through the system, seeing that it’s imploding in on itself, and then conflating that with the end of the world, with no hope of rebuilding something different afterward. Then you spread that doom online as enlightened pragmatism, confusing your emotional reactivity with moral clarity. This is passive self-sabotage that protects the ego from the terrifying demand of full awareness and agency, from the need to feel all the fear and confusion that are required to make it through times like these. 

Despair and doom are energetically less costly than holding full awareness with hopeful clarity.

This Neurological Lockout Is Collapse Fuel

This barrage of high negative messaging, of doomerism, is a form of psychological warfare waged on the human nervous system. High negative input triggers the amygdala. This primal threat-detection center instantly narrows focus, hijacks energy, and cuts off access to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain needed for strategy, empathy, and long-term planning. You cannot build from fight-flight-freeze-fawn.

This is my core concern with the constant flood of high negative messaging. Despair doesn’t mean you’re actually paying attention. It just means you’ve been neurologically overwhelmed. You are in amygdala hijack. In functional freeze. And once that happens, you are absolutely programmable. Politicians, media outlets, and algorithmic systems exploit this, because they do not want coherence, clarity, or courage. They want compliance and engagement. Fear spreads faster than facts. Rage gets more clicks than repair.

Over time, this chronic negative input creates learned helplessness. People stop believing change is possible. They stop seeing themselves as agents. This is collapse in slow motion because the very capacity for collective, coherent action is then systematically destroyed. By giving into the doomerism, we are literally doing their work for them. It is aiding and abetting manufactured sabotage.

Trauma Is the Trap Being Weaponized

The belief that everything is doomed is a profound trauma response. If you’ve been burned before, betrayed, or defeated, hope feels like a liability. Your nervous system learns that expecting good things only leads to pain. So you adapt. You start to believe: “better to expect collapse than risk disappointment.” The limbic brain mistakes familiar pain for safety, because at least you survived it last time. At least it’s something you know how to experience already.

This is not just “pessimism”. As I have explained in other articles, this is biology. It is the body remembering what the mind is trying to forget. So it just runs as a subconscious algorithm. Your despair and dooming is an adapted short-term survival response. But that same survival-level adaptation that felt like it once protected you is now preventing your evolution. 

We must also put this into historical context. I feel compelled to remind you that Black people did not get where we are today by just accepting the system as it was, or declaring everything to be hopeless. Indulging in hopelessness is the luxury of those who were never forced to fight for their fundamental existence.

Many online are pontificating on worst-case scenarios, fantasizing about wars they aren’t ready to fight, when most of them aren’t even ready to risk losing their health insurance for a while to shut the system down through non-participation. This fantasy is the passive echo of the trauma-adapted mind. It’s easier to talk about the grand, “final war” than it is to risk the small, real, every day present pain of collective non-cooperation.

The roots of this survival map go deep, but it’s critical to realize that the people indulging in this fantastical doomerism are using an old map for a new world. The cage door is open, but they won’t walk out because the familiar pain still feels safer than the unknown.

Where the Exits Are

There’s no chance of being right, of shifting the system, if you’ve already declared it to be impossible. Healing begins not with toxic positivity, but with compassionate disruption of amygdala hijack.

• Doom is not depth, and awareness is not an endless scroll of despair.

• The brain can tolerate truth even if it at first seems bleak, if it has a role in the repair.

• We need messaging that engages the nervous system without flooding it. 

• We need pattern recognition over panic, and vision rooted in grounded possibility.

You don’t have to believe in everything. I’m not saying it’s going to be a walk in the park.

The system as we know it must collapse because it is unsustainable and incoherent. It’s built on self-sabotaging extraction, exploitation, and inequality. But the collapse of an incoherent system doesn’t have to be the end of everything. You are not the system. You are not who the system told you that you had to be in order to survive. Those were programmed algorithms. All I am asking of you is to hold on to that, and just allow for the possibility of one thing going right. That’s how you begin to rewire the helplessness. Not with some grand manifesto of hope, but with one breath, one small action, one moment of choosing agency over agony and doom at a time.

And if you don’t like what I have to say above, I understand, but I also ask you to remember that this is the voice of someone who inherited the legacy of those who survived the Middle Passage, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, and still planted gardens in barren soil. Singing as they went. It’s the echo of voices who knew that helplessness was not a luxury they ever had.

You are more useful when you help others see the map and remember where the exits are. And if you see no exits, that’s because you’ve been programmed not to see.

You adapt by choosing agency. You adapt by planting the garden.

You are not more ethical or practical for believing it’s hopeless. That’s being helpless. And that’s exactly what they want.

For Further Reading: 

Amygdala Hijack: How It Works, Signs, & How To Cope: https://www.simplypsychology.org/amygdala-hijack.html

Amygdala Hijack: When Emotion Takes Over: https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/amygdala-hijack

Amygdala Hijack and the Fight or Flight Response: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-happens-during-an-amygdala-hijack-4165944

Amygdala Hijack: What It Is and How to Prevent It: https://psychcentral.com/health/amygdala-hijack

Amygdala: What It Is and What It Controls: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24894-amygdala