The Doomer Meme: A Case Study by Someone Too Old to Comment

It used to be a sign of getting old that you could no longer keep up with new albums as they were being released. I suppose that in the era of Spotify, this is less of an issue than it once was.

Now, the sign seems to be that one can no longer keep up with the meme economy.

I only just became aware of the Doomer meme, which apparently has been making the rounds of the fuck-my-life Internet for the past few months. And has become the topic of a whole Subreddit which seems to consist of sad young men with a fondness for walking around dark places late at night.

The original version, first seen September 16, 2018

As in the Book of Ecclesiastes: nothing new under the Sun. For at least as long as the period known as the “modern,” there have been subcultures that are reliant on the fundamental tension between a vague sense of hope that fails to coalesce into any kind of coherent vision and a more overwhelming sense of impending doom. When I was in high school, there were emo kids. Before then, goths. All the way back to the Dadaists, and before them the youth across Europe with Goethean pretensions who dressed like the titular character of his 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, and perhaps all the way back to Diogenes the Cynic, who jerked off and shat himself in public and then said something along the lines of “sorry for being REAL, you fucking sheeple!”

Some wallow in self-hatred. Others plot grand unworkable theories of human past and future, whether fascist, Maoist, Salafist, or whatever, to invoke some specter of power in the face of powerlessness. And some move on, get married, have kids, live happily ever after.

This is just an iteration in the era of late-capitalist accumulation and climate change, and as far I can tell a relatively small one, one which will in all likelihood barely if at all be remembered by history.

On the one hand, I'm tempted to view this as mawkishness and sentimentality – emotional bathos deployed in lieu of genuine connection – but that's a cheap shot, and ultimately one that comes off as condescending, and much to my horror, condescending to my younger self. For some reason, I'm paying attention. Maybe it's the fact that people are finding a common experience revolving around an inability around a sense of personal failure and misery that doesn't actually seem to fetishize that failure and misery, but instead seem to genuinely want to get better in the face of insurmountable odds. Maybe it's the fact that these seem to be people who realize the bullshit of late capitalism but haven't found a way to articulate it, especially given the absolute drought of humanistic education at the present moment.

And what triggers the most empathy is the having tried and tried again, and still failing. There's the tendency to turn inwards into poorly defined concepts of self-improvement, or into chemical self-medication, or into its close cousin technological self-medication. Which is something that comes so, so close to something that could have happened to me, and that kind of did happen to me.

Particularly, it's the nightwalk concept that actually interests me – another subject that has its own Subreddit – which given the isolated young men with poor prospects that seem to be attracted to this particular form of communication, often tends to be the aggressively bland streets of suburban and exurban and small-town America.

And I can so distinctly remember the vibe of isolated walks around a town in Iowa, tract housing and highway bypasses, a Panera and a Long John Silver's and a Hobby Lobby, the cardboard signs for discounts on 30-racks of Natty Ice and cartons of USA Gold cigarettes, the frigid fluorescent lights over rows of Monster energy drinks, the flash of an old boxcar – Denver, Rio Grande, and Southern – an iconic design from another era, a poem from the past, the bilious lights coming on in the old hotel downtown, peering into the lives of its residents, an ancient man with a bottle of Cutty Sark in the window, a mentally disabled woman in her 30s with a hacked-off blonde bob and a stained pink hoodie, seeing them look out into the February night and wondering what the fuck they saw in it all.

The only difference is that instead of listening to Soundcloud rappers and Spotify ambient mixes, I was listening to a Limewire'd and burned CD of Godspeed You Black Emperor's F#A# (infinity).

I avoided the worst. I didn't become an insufferable gamer, a vile political reactionary, an otaku. I became someone who more or less passes in polite society. But there's a performative quality to it, and nothing will shatter the mask more than, say, listening to a song I like on Youtube, only to have it followed up by an ad with a cheerful voice telling me to buy Head and Shoulders. And at the end of the day, I find a greater sense of kindred understanding in a W.G. Sebald novel, a Joan Didion essay, or a Joy Division album than anything else.