The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.
Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don’t believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.
The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.
And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?
(Welcome back, everybody!)
I’m an antinatalist. It’s a different mindset, and it’s focused on “not losing,” i.e. by not playing the game at all. This is in contrast to the more common mindset of focusing on “playing to win.” In the fight-or-flight paradigm, it is choosing flight. I’d be curious to know what personality traits other antinatalists have, include their fear response.
These futureless left, whether consciously or not, are going on a birthstrike. This is a combination of a protest but also opting out of the future if things don’t change for the better.
You may disagree and/or dislike it, but that’s my take on what it is about.
I just figure if I do have kids, there are very few things that will be better than I have now. It’s not really fear just I don’t want my kids to live through the worst weather/shortages/pollution ever + companies being better than ever at trying to manipulate people and suck their life away.
It’s also that having a family steeply increases your exposure to an unfair system that you don’t want to be even more of a slave to.
I’m one of those doomers. Looking at the science, at the data and the new findings that come out every year, it’s not even really debatable that all of civilization will collapse within the next century.
Genuinely. That’s where we’re at.
1.5C is dead. 2C is dead. 3C is on its last legs and we are on track for 8-10C avg temp rise globally. The oceans will be practically dead acidic wastes by then, the insect populations will collapse and anything that needs pollinated will follow suit.
I am all for dying in the streets defending what we have from fascists and preventing them from making the last few decades we have exponentially worse, but I think it’s wrong to claim that we can have a good future.
We can perhaps save a few million more people by the end of the century so that the total human population will be maybe near a billion.
That’s the best I can offer. Mass starvation and death. Sorry
I don’t think doomerism or anti-natalism are serious positions, but I will not have leftist prepping lumped in with them! The imperial core is collapsing and that’s going to be really hard to live through without at least some knowledge about canning, solar panels, gardening, rainwater collection, repair, and how to shoot a gun.
What distinguishes lefty prepping from the normal rightist variants is a focus on building community before it’s too late, and that’s literally how we’ll build a future. In fact, prepping on the left comes from a belief that there is a future, it’s just going to be hard (not even forever, just long enough that the power might go out).
Prepping is literally working for tomorrow, like???
It’s the ‘this will get worse before it gets better’ position. That does seem rational and I am tempted to prepare for the worst too. One issue I see with that position is… if you build yourself a little life raft you probably aren’t as concerned as you should be about the sinking ship.
That’s why the emphasis has to be on community prepping. If you build a life raft for yourself you aren’t really taking the sinking ship seriously imo - we sink or swim together. We’ll get through the hard times together with community gardens and communal power generation and repairing each other’s things, not by becoming isolated weirdos entombed in little bunkers.
In Sweden leftist prepping groups call themselves „Preppa Tillsammans“ which means „Prepping Together“. The idea now has some followers in Germany as well. They call it „Solidarisches Preppen“ (Prepping Solidarily).
Imho these can easily be the roots of a solarpunk future. Bottom up, local, self sufficient.
Solarpunk for me has always been, at its roots, an anarchist ideology that espouses the tenants of mutual aid and bottom-up, horizontal community structures to build a self-sufficient, sustainable society. That’s the “punk” part of solarpunk.
That’s the beauty of prepping solidarily: people understand it right away (especially in the context of climate crisis and as a form of civil disaster relief or protection) but are not scared by „dirty words“ like anarchist or communist. They’ll learn it eventually.
Build it, let them experience the results of praxis first hand, give them a chance to be a part of it to get a see internal politics in action, then it becomes hard for them to deny the validity of the ideology behind it after they put the dots together.
Yeah, I see what you’re saying, but I think my point still holds. I’ll update my analogy. You have some people that’ll jump in your raft with you. So now everyone with access to the raft isn’t as concerned as they should be about the sinking ship?
Most people don’t like the ship anyway. Perhaps the raft can be scaled up so that it’s a ship in itself and everyone who wants to can get on.
But at that point, what’s the problem? The problem the OP is describing is one of hopelessness and not having a vision for the future, but the very act of building these life rafts and cooperating on the rafts to build community is itself a vision for the future.
The vision of the future is everyone working together and overcoming the dangers ahead. Prepping can be an act of hope.
I think the biggest issue around doomerism is the framing. Everyone frames it as if we should just accept that society is doomed and give up, but that’s not what it is about. Doomerism is about accepting that society as we know it is doomed if we continue doing what we are doing.
Yet saying this isn’t a call to give up and let it happen. It’s a call to wake up and realize we have to dig deep and fundamentally change how we are doing things.
Things are hopeless in our current society, so we need to work to change into one that can have hope for a bright future. To do that requires letting go of the old one.
Right, but it’s still ‘it’s going to get worse before it gets better’ and if you’re okay and the community you care about is okay, then you may not care if the ship is on a collision course and will sink even though there’s a lot of people that don’t have the means to get off.
Why would anyone prep if they didn’t care the ship is on a collision course? It seems like they care a lot! That’s why they prep!
The issue you’re seeing seems to apply to everyone who isn’t prepping, so it doesn’t really seem like this is a problem that’s caused by prepping. Normal people think everything is going to be fine and don’t worry that the ship is on a collision course.
Also, you’re thinking of community as some kind of exclusive thing, like a walled private community or something. It can’t be that way if the goal is to survive. Normal people don’t get to pick who is part of their community, it just sort of happens based on where we live and work and such. Building community means bringing in the people who don’t have the means, not excluding them because they can’t afford the entrance fee to the bunker or life raft. We don’t have the luxury of being so selective.
Grab the steering wheel? That’s what the article was getting at. People who are prepping have already written society off. Attempts to repair and rectify are not made in earnest, instead smaller scale alternatives are sought with the naive idea that the facists will just ignore you.
I definitely agree we have an imagination problem, but I don’t think it’s limited to ‘the left.’ I actually think the issue lies squarely with (classical) liberalism and the values it instills. Any time someone with an optimistic vision starts to voice it people pile on with 500 reasons it’s impractical. People have a very “we can’t do better or we already would have” mindset. People also want there to be a general solution that works mechanically for everyone.
As mundane as it sounds I think the key really is fostering a sense of self-determination in our communities. Encouraging people to use their own resourcefulness to solve problems they see in their communities and in the world.
This isn’t limited to small or local problems, Instead of working for google tech bros could be building logistics programs to allow people to organize global food distribution through piecemeal contributions of food and transportation.
Things are the way they are because they were built that way under specific incentives and the people in power do not want to lose it. This is not inevitable or the best we can do. If we change our priorities and stop letting ‘the market’ act as a proxy for what we want to see, there is plenty of room for optimism about the future.
People are reasonable for not wanting to bring children into the world during a famine. Let’s plant some trees and pull eachother up and build communities people can imagine their kids thriving in first.
i read about newly discovered plants, and animals, everytime it always end up they are already threatened, especially plants that are very niche.
This generation grew up watching the rich get richer and their families get less and less. They watch the adults around them work 50 hours a week for the privilege of renting an apartment, no vacations anywhere, barely able to afford healthcare.
Do they have it wrong?
The founder of the Antinatalism International, Anugraha Kumar Sharma, argues that “there is absolutely no hope whatsoever in this world.”
If he really didn’t have any hope - didn’t give a shit - he wouldn’t have bothered setting up an international organisation, on some level declaring himself in charge of people who don’t want to have kids.
Just because you don’t have hope doesn’t mean that you won’t try to make some measure of difference. You can still play the hand you’ve been dealt, and making the outcome slightly less bad is still something to put effort into.
Hopeless: Having no possibility of being solved or dealt with; impossible.
There is more than one definition of most words - particularly on a personal level, which is where many disputes come from, particularly online, where some people apparently can’t see that you are making a passing, light-hearted comment.
Then again, maybe the clue is in the name and I should just block.
Then again, maybe the clue is in the name and I should just block.
If that’s how you want to be, then I’ll do you a favor and solve your dilemma for you.
Bye!
The founder of the Antinatalism International, Anugraha Kumar Sharma, argues that “there is absolutely no hope whatsoever in this world.”
Well, that’s hard to argue against. I might disagree, but I cannot artificially give him any hope, even if he wants some.
For some, the progressive embrace of antinatalism might just be a reaction to the pronatalism espoused by the Right. Because Vice President J. D. Vance wants you to have more children, the only natural reply is that we ought to have none.
Not for me. They can want all they want, but to consider children, I imagine I would need to find a society relatively free of strife, a society with lower risk. I would need to feel somewhat secure in my own future, because you have to raise children for a hefty amount of time. Most importanly, I’d have to find someone who’d like to do this together.
Some creatures respond to environmental stress by breeding earlier and faster, and trying to do that more desperately. I cannot find such a response in my own “code”. I respond to environmental stress by saving resources to overcome hardship, and focusing effort to defeat the source of hardship. If that means a decline in population by 1.7 people, so be it.
I think that in the modern times, more people have started thinking this way. Having children is expensive and can effectively put you below the poverty line, and stop you from pursuing goals, whatever they are.
I’m not even anti-natalist. I’m just not interested in reproduction - precisely because I still have a future that I might influence for the better - but not if I waste my resources on reproduction.
Also, I think a scarcity of humans might actually cause society to value humans more. In the Middle Ages, when the plague reduced populations, serfs were able to obtain better conditions and break the pattern of slavery in many lands. Feudal lords struggled because their vast empty lands could not be managed by their dwindling crew - someone could till a field or hunt game without paying taxes or asking for permission out there. Of course, this pattern might not apply in modern times, however.
the global democratic left has been incapable of developing an economic agenda that looks beyond the next election cycle.
Not sure if I can agree. Over here, the agenda looks pretty clear. Achieve progressive taxation. Achieve higher taxation of capital than labour. Achieve lower taxation of worker-owned companies. Achieve universal health insurance. Beyond the economic, achieve a governing system not disproportionately influenced by the wealthy. Preferably, achieve all this without violence.
(and reaching those goals is prevented by the disproportionate propaganda capability of the economic right, mostly financed by the wealthy)
Hmm, I find that argument not very convincing. Except for some online nutcases no one on the left seriously argues for voluntary human extinction 🙄
It is rather the lack of long term planning that brought us to the current situation that the planet has way more humans than it can easily sustain.
Trying to organize a soft landing by slowly reducing the population, especially in areas that have a high resource use foot print, seems rather like long term planning to me. And it also makes it easier to welcome others from regions that will likely become uninhabitable due to climate change in the medium term future.
In addition, I find it rather hilarious that someone seriously thinks humans procreate because of long term thinking 😅
People really believe this thinly veiled eugenics argument?
There is plenty of resources to support humanity. The issue is solely in our societal structures and our distribution of those resources causing almost half of everything we produce to become waste because it profit couldn’t be extracted from it.
We could cut most of our production, reducing our environmental harm, redesign our cities so they are not sprawling wastelands of parking lots and empty lawns, and there would be plenty enough to go around. That’s real long term planning we need to have.
The problem is not that we do not have the resources, but rather the way humans chose to use them. Multiply that by 8 billion and we get a problem, although realistically the bigger problem are the top 2-3 billion or so that control so many resources.
In a world with a significantly lower population, the planet could absorb the issues we cause much better.
I don’t see how this fact has anything to do with eugenics 🤷
The argument that “there are too many people and we need to reduce the population” has been for decades a thinly veiled excuse to justify eugenics. Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce? How will the social mechanisms work to reduce population? Who will hold that authority to dictate things and how will it be enforced? Historically, very violently and strictly enforced against marginalized communities. That’s how.
I literally said the problem is how we use them.
The issue is solely in our societal structures and our distribution of those resources
So the answer is we need to work towards societal change and structure ourselves to incentivize sustainability, not overly simplistic and unethical arguments such as “reduce the population” so we can maintain our shitty practices and kick the can down the road.
It also isn’t “top 2-3 billion”, it’s more like “top 2-3 thousand”.
You are arguing a strawman. Both the article and me are talking about people voluntarily chosing to not have children. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and neither with promoting the idea that this is totally ok.
And no, it isn’t just the top few thousand. Even if those were gone tomorrow we would still have very similar issues realistically speaking. But sure, limiting the excesses of the top few thousands would also help and is a politically reachable goal. Solving the over-consumption of the top 2-3 billion needs an strong change in mindset, and politics alone will not be able to do that. But at least many of these 2-3 billion are already getting few children voluntarily.
@poVoq @Doc_Crankenstein
Voluntary is… an interesting choice of terms, to say the least.If you can and want, could you explain who these top two to three billion (holy moly!) consumers are and what is characteristic to their overconsumption?
If you don’t want to do this in this thread, Tag me in the appropriate toot.
Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce? How will the social mechanisms work to reduce population? Who will hold that authority to dictate things and how will it be enforced?
Interestingly it doesn’t seem like those questions need to be answered, since the birthrate is dropping all by itself for some reason.
Microplastics causing infertility is the main reason for that. Hard to have babies when men’s nuts can’t properly produce viable sperm or women can’t properly form a placenta and their ovaries have atrophied.
There are also socioeconomic reasons where people are avoiding pregnancy, plus the breaking down of community togetherness exacerbating the “loneliness epidemic” and people just aren’t meeting each other and going on dates anymore, also due to socioeconomic factors. There is also the antinatalist movement but unsure as to the size of it.
Either way, the call to “reduce populations” is a bullshit argument. Just because it is happening naturally (or due to natural phenomena as a result of the externalities from human activity) doesn’t excuse the call for an authority to dictate that decision for others.
I really doubt it’s microplastics. There aren’t a bunch of people complaining of infertility. I would guess it’s socioeconomic.
I don’t think anyone likes the idea of anyone else telling them how many kids they can have, but they’ll probably take that over their kids starving. Probably won’t come to that.
Bruh, there are legitimate issues to reproductive health caused by microplastics. That’s just a fact. Microplastics are so small they can bypass the blood-testi barrier and disrupt spermatogenesis. They also leech chemicals into the blood that mimic certain hormones, fucking up our endocrine system which has a negative effect on reproductive health as well. There actually are a bunch of people having issues with infertility across the globe, and research shows it is due to microplastics affecting reproductive health, but the current media framing of the argument around microplastics isn’t highlighting that specific issue. It is being lumped in with the rest of the issues caused by microplastics and how we don’t fully understand just how harmful the build up is to our health overall.
The point is that falling birth rates is a multifaceted issue. It isn’t one or the other. It is both medical issues caused by microplastics and socioeconomic stresses.
Also, there isn’t a dichotomy between “being told how many kids you can have” and “having their kids starve”. Those two things are not mutually exclusive, so they don’t have to “take one over the other”. No one has to choose between the two nor should they be forced to choose by any body of authority.
Which ethnicity’s population are we going to reduce?
I honestly believe that “we” aren’t going to do jack s**t. It’s a process which is nearly unsteerable. People are going to live longer and longer, and use resources that would otherwise be used by children they might have had. Society is going to be burdened by caring for the old, and this is going to reduce chances of caring for the young.
In nearly every developed country, population growth is slowing or population has already started decreasing. Only in the least developed regions (some areas of Africa) does the opposite still apply, but UN predictions (made by competent people) suggest the process just reaches there later.
So, every ethnicity’s population is going to be reduced. Every ethnicity can also consider if their numbers are adequate, too high or too low. If a nation feels threatened by disappearing from the maps, they can try to reorganize their society. Random ideas: a few laws that give parents various health and social security guarantees regardless of their employment status, especially in case they’re single parents, then maybe create a few dating sites that actually try to help their users find people they like, etc…
Yes, everything you said is good, and we should be attempting to restructure our society to be more sustainable and ethical in our use of resources but that is a much larger political discussion about economics. I know there are currently natural and sociopolitical phenomena that are slowing down the growth of certain regions but the reasons why is a much larger, multifaceted discussion. Populations will fluctuate naturally and that’s all fine and dandy.
but my point was specifically against those who call for attempting to steer the process in an effort to deliberately reduce the population through planned means which is intrinsically linked to eugenics arguments when you get down to the sociopolitical mechanisms of how that will be accomplished.
There is plenty of resources to support humanity.
I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.
I think we shouldn’t use up every atom on Earth to churn out more humans. Our species has experienced a massive population explosion and is at peak numbers.
Usually this kind of events are followed by a hurtful population crash. It seems considerably better if growth ends due to a (subconscious?) decision to stop expanding, rather than a war for remaining resources.
I cannot say I agree, and I think I recall that some indicators currently suggest we’d need about 3 planets to keep going at the same pace.
The back of the envelope calculation says if everybody on Earth lived like an average American we’d need the resources of about four Earths to cover it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712
That being said, from the same source, if everyone on Earth lived like an average Indian we’d only use half the Earth’s resources and could support twice as many people.
So it’s not about the number of people - it’s about the standard of living those people have and the resources they use.
I think the most effective way forward is more efficient and sustainable lifeways - if the richest countries learn to consume less, if people around the world get access to better technology and better institutions to raise their standard of living without raising their resource consumption.
And it’s interesting to note, the better off people are, the fewer children they tend to have. If we improve people’s lives worldwide, a steadily declining population will be a natural side effect.
An incredibly difficult goal, of course, but worth pursuing.
I think we shouldn’t use up every atom on Earth to churn out more humans.
Good thing no one said to do this. I don’t appreciate bad faith reframing of my argument.
It was meant to be humorous framing, given the impossibility of making humans from magma or the iron core. :)
From my perspective it is a disingenuous, bad faith framing of my position meant to exaggerate it and mock it as if it was absurd.
In addition, I find it rather hilarious that someone seriously thinks humans procreate because of long term thinking 😅
I mean, kids are a lifetime investment. Most people think about whether they can afford to feed and educate their kids over the next few decades, and what kind of life the kids will have after that. In countries without social safety nets, children are often the only retirement plan. I think the decision to have kids (or not) is the longest term planning the average person will ever do.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily good planning, but it’s certainly thinking long term.
With that being said, I think this article isn’t claiming not having kids is a problem in itself. It’s a symptom of the real problem - despair for the future.
People choosing not to have kids for positive reasons? Because they have a vision of the future with a lower population and choose to live their values? Great! No problem there.
But when people choose not to have kids because they think the world is collapsing around them, that they can’t give children a good life, that there’s no hope for the future and it would be immoral to expose a child to the coming tribulations - those decisions are made because people give up on the future.
The despair is the problem - the decisions made out of despair are just the symptoms.
And it’s hard to motivate people to work for a better world now when they have no hope for a better world in the future. If we’re all doomed anyway, why not burn all the oil you want and let the fascists take over?
I think even worse than “no future” is no change. Biden and Kamala pretty much ran on “we are not stupid (like Trump) otherwise no change” and Trump ran on “I’m going to change everything”.
It seems the left is scared to propose/pitch radical change.
Not that radical change is necessarily good (see Argentina’s historical flip-flop from radical left, right, libertarian, and authoritarian) its just that belief of change is required to believe in a better future.
I’ll always remember that time when Obama was up on stage taking questions from the Internet after having literally run on change as a campaign slogan and when someone asked about legalizing marijuana he literally laughed as if that would be absurd. And this is someone who did change quite a lot. The Democratic party’s mainstream has been afraid of radical change for a long time, even though it’s been demonstrated over and over again that it’s what brings energy to the party and gives them the ability to move the ball.
I really hope this past election makes them a little less cautious and a little less centrist. We really can’t have our representatives just sitting on their hands waiting for the tide to wash away any and all progress. We have to keep pushing forward so when we do take a step back we don’t lose everything all at once.
I agree. Biden’s presidency was the biggest lost opportunity of my lifetime for exactly that reason.
FDR responded to a similar global challenge - the Great Depression - by transforming the American government to serve the needs of struggling Americans - and the American people rewarded his courage and vision with overwhelming support when he ran for his second term.
Biden? Barely tried to improve America. And everything he tried failed. He couldn’t even reduce student loan payments. And when Harris had the opportunity to break with him and fight for her own vision of what America could be, she either had no vision of her own or was too afraid to fight for it.
The American “left” is terrified to promote anything more than a return to the Obama-era status quo. But if they don’t find their vision and courage the United States is guaranteed one party Republican rule for another generation.
Its weird to have to defend Biden but he did get some things done, the way you are characterizing his record isn’t really accurate. I would expect that if Biden had FDRs numbers in Congress he would have been a lot more successful too. Not that his term wasn’t also a lost opportunity and full of failures, but not everything failed. There’s a whole bunch of people who don’t owe student loans now for example, even if they weren’t all forgiven due to the courts, etc.
Even the best path out of the current situation involves us fighitiny the current rise in fascism around the world, and even an optimistic prediction for the path of climate change is harrowing.
I’m not putting a kid through that.
We are neurologically hard wired to prioritize information that evokes fear. Fascism thrives on that fact and was kept in place for some time by human intelligence to cut through quite some bullshit. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’ made the layer to cut through so thick it’s harder and harder to do so. AI and social media algorithms is flooding the zone with shit on unknown dimensions. We all need to digitally detox and go for classic, analogous comminity building. Like species homo has done for 2 million years.
Great article. I agree with most of the author’s points. I find doomers very annoying and problematic. Why even argue that position? Why try to convince people to join you wallowing in misery? I think they just want to confirm to themselves that nothing can be done so they can continue doing nothing.
One other question: It’s hard to deny that this problem is hitting the West and Western influenced countries quite hard. What’s it like in China? They’re building for the future and talking about and working on tech that could help everyone. Are people in China largely optimistic?
Nope. China is very pessimistic at the moment.
Lots of… not wanting kids even if not actual antinatalism. Due to no free time, competition for resources, and people having no ability to live for themselves before 24 or so. High costs as the assumption of 2 parents 1 child is baked into the costs of everything, from kids’ activities to the education system.
The place seems to be aware something big is coming, and no one seems optimistic. All the chatter about growth, new tech, hasn’t been felt in people’s lives or incomes yet, in fact the inverse as businesses close up and everyone becomes a Didi driver (滴滴司机) or a Meituan deliverer (外卖哥/姐) and that’s the same gig economy rubbish we have, only with fewer rights and protections.
Ugh, that’s a bummer, but thanks for the insight
You’re welcome. It’s a big place and never gets a fair voice in Anglophone media. Alas, it’s still no utopia or shining beacon.
But all the same, for a country that has spent its whole existence staring down the barrel of the USA, the PRC has done well for itself. Raised living standards according to UN/World Bank metrics. Drastically reduced unintended (wording due to one child policy) deaths of children.
But the Cultural Revolution did a number on society that helped shape it into the nation of alienated neoliberal subjects it is today.
Great article! I agree that the left needs to better present its vision to the world, both as a concrete political proposal, as well as in general popular culture, things like art and stories that show the future.
I’m not sure if this is a thing already, but maybe monthly events could be organized here for reading and discussing specific solarpunk novels, competitions on creating solarpunk art etc? It would be one way to strenghten a specific image of the community that could be used to manifest ourselves to the world.
I’ve never understood why breeding exponentially forever is somehow expected to work… Like infinite expansion capitalism, it’s ignoring the fact that things are finite.