The Doomer-Bloomer Oscillation
On several occasions now, I’ve found myself having typed out one particular tweet only to delete it with a big sigh every time. The tweet is not so much a desperate plea for help as much as it is an invitation for the best and brightest out there to help with a problem that I and millions of others out there are experiencing. The tweet?
“Help, I’m oscillating.”
But of course, I understand that such a simple statement will convey little, if any, meaning to most people without proper context. I can imagine the thoughts of those who stumble across the strange arrangement of words: “What the hell does it mean to be oscillating and why would you need help with it?”
It’s a fair question, so instead of resigning myself to the tedious task of explaining myself in a series of 280-character replies, I’ve decided to lay it all out for you here.
It may be my Zoomer bias speaking, but it’s reasonable to assume that most everyone reading this article is familiar with the popular Wojack variant “Doomer” — a young guy donning a black beanie, often with unkempt stubble and bloodshot eyes, who possesses a detached, fatalistic, and generally pessimistic outlook on both the present and the future. In many ways, the Doomer is the contemporary incarnation of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.
And just like his archetypal ancestor, the Doomer has a number of fair reasons to take the so-called “black pill”: the economic growth which young people expected, which they were promised, which was embedded as a feature of most every system and institution for the last several decades, is failing to arrive as promised; social capital and those systems which bond and bridge us are on the decline while polarization, righteousness, and tribalism are on the rise; we are becoming more and more disconnected from perennial wisdom and traditional ways of living by the day; and to top it all off, environmental and demographic concerns are a constant, looming threat on the horizon. All that being said, it is not difficult to see why many young people might be embracing the Doomer state of mind.
Our system has framed success in mostly material terms as a result of the embedded growth obligation or EGO. The EGO and the materialist, hyperindividualistic nature of postliberalism lead us (particularly those of us in the West) to subscribe to the sensate conception of liberty, that is, the idea that liberty involves the continual growth of means alongside a continual growth in wants and desires. You can see where sensate liberty demands never-ending growth, a flawed premise.
But what do you get when you have a conception of liberty that necessitates the expansion of means and a world in which many people feel that the future of their means is uncertain at best? Well, you get disappointed, defeated Doomers. Needless to say, that’s not really the best thing for society.
Yet, almost as soon as we saw the Doomer meme enter the noosphere, we also saw the birth of his antithetical younger brother, the Bloomer. Whereas the Doomer is bleak, pessimistic, and detached from the world around him, the Bloomer is a bright and optimistic figure, enthusiastic and committed to the pursuit of a good and meaningful life despite being well aware of the world’s darker aspects. The Bloomer, then, tends to shift towards an ascetic conception of liberty, in which internal limitations over one’s desires, not the expansion of their means, keeps the ratio balanced. If one can’t control the world around them, the least they could do is control themself.
However, this is probably the point where you are wondering how this all related to oscillation. Out of courtesy, I’ll get straight to the point.
The metamodern era in which we find ourselves today is characterized neither by the detached, ironic, and nihilistic worldview of the Doomer nor by the committed, enthusiastic, utopian worldview of the Bloomer. Indeed, the metamodern state of being is characterized by a metaxy, a self-aware oscillation, between the two — more of a “both-neither” situation than an “in-between” one. To be a Bloomer, one must have once been a Doomer and acquired the perspective and knowledge that comes with it, and to be a Doomer, one must long for the very same romanticized past that the Bloomer tries to will back into our present existence. And that’s my point. I can’t be one or the other no matter how much easier it would be; instead, like many others, I must reconcile two seemingly-irreconcilable identities and worldviews. While it may be a sisyphean task, it’s a worthwhile one.
To be a Zoomer is to suffer, and blossom, as a result of this Doomer-Bloomer oscillation. It is to have grown up with ironic and cynical media while still holding onto a nostalgia for a time which we have never known, and in fact, only seen on the wrong end of postmodern criticism. It is to see the ongoing decline in growth and opportunities for young people while remaining optimistic about our future prospects, if not here, then in the stars. It is to see where modernism failed through the postmodern lense and attempting to integrate the two into something that propels us forward.
So when I tweet out “Help, I’m oscillating” what I’m really trying to get at is this: I’m stuck between whether to lean into passion and sincerity or to disconnect at risk of getting hurt or looking a fool. I’m stuck between a desire to believe that I can achieve anything and an apathy about actually pursuing any sort of achievement. I’m stuck between Doomer and Bloomer, between the Cave and the Cosmos.
I want to watch the shadows on the walls even though I know exactly what they really are, and I also want to see the Sun while hoping there’s a layer of reality beyond even that. I want to live the sensate liberty of my parents and grandparents, in which I get to demand and expect ever-more in life, and I also want to master my own wants and desires, living in an aesthetic liberty that somehow feels both entirely foreign and inexplicably native.
I want to stop oscillating because it’s uncomfortable and feels unsustainable. But I’ve got to admit, it also feels kind of good.
