Progressive Doomerism Is a Trap

In a recent essay for the New Yorker, the writer Sarah Miller says that she used to drink as a kind of rebellion against an uncaring planet. “How could anyone not drink in a world where the most flourishing partnerships seemed to be the ones between climate collapse and state-sponsored violence?” she writes.

When sobriety got trendy a few years ago and everyone was posting on social media about quitting drinking, Miller dug in her heels. She was no trend-follower:

People who didn’t drink talked about having clarity. They talked about health. I did not believe in clarity. I did not believe in health. I believed in things like the fact that the oceans were getting hot, and that a lot of Palestinians were dead, and that I, an American, had been obligated to help finance both. So I drank, daily, sometimes with some moderation, but often enough with none.

Miller’s essay is ultimately about how and why she stopped drinking. It is the kind of thing one hears a lot in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — it follows the classic “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now” arc of an alcoholic’s story. But what stands out is her admission that she connected her drinking to her political views. Like many progressives, she has a profoundly pessimistic vision of the world, and while she no longer drinks, she still holds on to that pessimism. “I often still feel very bad, because the world is terrible much of the time, even if you become sober,” she writes, continuing:

I live in a famously beautiful place, but the daylight hours are filled with the sounds of chainsaws and chippers, as both private citizens and government agencies fulfill mandates to clear the area of excess foliage so that when the next wildfire inevitably starts it will have less fuel. I doubt that the chainsawing will help. People are always performing tasks that allow them to pretend things are getting better, and it still hurts to watch, but I’m glad to be freed from the belief that getting drunk will make things seem less bad.

Is the world in fact terrible? Or maybe a better question is: What is the world?

For most of us, the outside world is delivered through the internet — social media, your phone. And for all the progressive negativity, for all the left’s professed suspicion of big tech, there isn’t enough suspicion of the information ecosystem that brings the world to us. Instead, many people seem ready to believe sources that tell them everything is getting worse all the time. Twenty years ago, Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a liberal bias.” Today the internet, which is mistaken for reality by many people, has a negativity bias.

The well-documented correlations between depression, irritability, and posting a lot mean that the things you see online are likely made by people who themselves are angry or upset; enraging or upsetting pieces of content are more likely to travel on social media. Add in the tendency toward negativity in the news stories that get published – which in turn is driven by people choosing to consume more negative news — and you have a media environment that seems to be all pain, all the time.

The impact of this collective negativity can be found in public polling. A recent Pew report found that 85 percent of Americans think political violence is getting worse. A Data for Progress survey found that 60 percent of Americans believe life in the U.S. is getting worse — a trend particularly pronounced among Democratic voters. That poll found that the top worries were about the cost of living and societal division, but there were a lot of other concerns:

More than 1 in 4 voters are also “extremely worried” about authoritarianism (31%), wealth inequality (31%), environmental degradation (30%), processed food and medications (29%), technology addiction (28%), decline in traditions (27%), physical safety (26%), and decline in family and parenthood (26%).

Every year, the American Psychological Association puts out a study called Stress in America. The most recent edition found that 76 percent of respondents were worried about the future of the nation, a figure that’s held steady since 2024. Some people reported mulling major life changes because of this fear: “Nearly two-thirds of those ages 18–34 (63%) and more than half of parents (53%) said they have considered relocating to another country due to the state of the nation.” Other research has found that reading or watching negative news stories can have detrimental effects on mental health — there’s even a term, vicarious trauma, that can refer to the effects of mainlining horrific images through your phone. According to one study, stress from paying attention to politics can be so acute that it causes some people to have suicidal thoughts. Google “news anxiety” and you’ll be greeted with a flood of advice for how to manage this sort of stress. “Since the rise of 24-hour news cycles, the internet, and cell phones, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to switch off the constant stream of headlines,” advises a blog post from the meditation app Headspace.

Some people can shrug off this negativity. Others get mired in it. Some people, like Miller, have mental health issues that might be aggravated by prolonged exposure to negative content. There are people today who suffer from “climate anxiety,” a sometimes debilitating condition of fear for the planet’s future. Here’s how Sarah Lowe, a clinical psychologist at Yale, explained the condition in a 2022 interview:

Climate anxiety is fundamentally distress about climate change and its impacts on the landscape and human existence. That can manifest as intrusive thoughts or feelings of distress about future disasters or the long-term future of human existence and the world, including one’s own descendants. There is a physiological component that would include heart racing and shortness of breath, and a behavioral component: when climate anxiety gets in the way of one’s social relationships or functioning at work or school.

Anxiety linked to climate change may be pushing some young people not to have children, the Associated Press reported last year, both out of generalized fear for the children’s safety and concern that those children would create more carbon emissions. One woman told the AP, “I didn’t want to add another person to the world and have them have more of an impact on a world that was already overstressed and strained by the number of humans that were here.” A bioethics professor who was concerned about the carbon impact of children but nevertheless wanted to be a dad wound up having only one child.

Climate change isn’t the only existential threat looming in our collective imagination. Posters on AI-related subreddits and the rationalist forum LessWrong have for years been debating whether it’s okay to have children when those children will likely be murdered or enslaved by killer robots1.

Climate change is real, of course, as are a lot of issues that attract attention online. The negativity bias of the news arises in part because a core mission of journalism is to identify problems in the hopes that they can be solved by policymakers and concerned citizens. Being informed about current events is important. But merely feeling bad about the world does not change it. Miller’s drinking did not help the Palestinians she was so concerned with. If the news makes you feel sad or angry, you should take that as a cue to consider how you can improve the world — but this is not what social media companies want. The business model of social media relies on users looking at things that make them upset, then continuing to scroll and consume more upsetting content.

Extremely powerful companies are using sophisticated technology to keep as many people as possible in a state of restless irritability. Some people may welcome that sensation — it’s sort of romantic to wrap yourself in cynicism and pessimism, to imagine standing in a world that’s collapsing around you. Or better yet, to imagine that you are one of the few people smart enough to know how bad things are. Lucky you!

It seems moderately heretical to suggest that pessimism may not be just counterproductive but just incorrect. We could have a whole debate about the probabilities of various climate change scenarios or whether the world is getting more or less violent and authoritarian — but I don’t think the anxiety I’m describing is entirely about facts. It’s about a worldview. If you want to, you can let go of pessimism. I suspect a lot of people simply don’t want to. When Sarah Miller hears people using chainsaws and chippers to clear brush, she doubts it will help. She doesn’t say why she thinks she knows better than those people. Someone else might hear the same sound and think, I’m glad my neighbors are working to mitigate future wildfire damage. We’re all pitching in.

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