The pandemics are what really get me right now. Long covid brain fog is basically early onset Alzheimer’s disease. My grandma died from that in 2007 after a long struggle and it was a horrible time for everyone involved. And for me, being trans and transitioning later, I especially can’t afford to get it. When you get Alzheimer’s the memories leave you in reverse order. That means that one of the first things I’d forget is my new name and my real gender, and the only things I’d be able to remember would be from the dissociative haze before my transition. That’s terrifying to me and I’d rather die quickly and painfully.

And the chances of this excruciating, slow undeath go up every time you catch Covid. And people are catching Covid again in less than a month in some cases. And once you catch it, it doesn’t leave your body. I’m immunocompromised already, maybe because of getting Covid at the start, maybe because of something else. How am I supposed to be able to live a good, long life like this? It’s impossible. And to top it off, we have a second pandemic ongoing (monkeypox) that most countries are taking almost no precautions against. And climate change will be constantly sending more things our way while everyone gets acquired immunodeficiency from Covid. It’s insanity to allow this virus to spread as it has and we insist on spreading it as much as possible. The only thing that gives me hope among all of this is that this pandemic will hasten the decline and fall of the American empire. May it go quietly and a socialist state grow quickly from its rotted corpse.

First, I’m sorry to hear that you feel your own life is collapsing. I hope you have people or a person around you to talk to and who might be able to help. It may be that you have to put aside some of your politics (at least don’t make politics the centre of every conversation if that’s something you do), but it is possible to form a community within capitalism with people who can help you get through tougher times; it may take some building.

Try to take a break if you can. Go for a walk or sit or lie down. There’s only so much individual control we have over our living conditions, and it’s harder to exercise that little control if we’re stressed and unable to think clearly.

I can empathise and I joke about not having a habitable planet in 40 years, but we need to have hope and dismiss the doomerism.

I cannot speak for people in the global south as my experience is of the imperial core. So I cannot say whether this sense of doom is worldwide. But there seems to be an extra layer to the doomerism in the West.

I will try to unpick the sense of doom to see if it helps us to think differently.

Climate change and COVID have emphasised a vocal clique in the global north that has no idea how the most disadvantaged people live in their own countries and elsewhere. So when things went wrong with COVID and with climate change on the horizon, it suddenly seemed that new problems were arising. (We might also say the same of the housing crisis of 2007–8.)

These are only new problems for, let’s say, the labour aristocracy and the petite bourgeois. As these voices are the ones we usually hear in the press and on the radio and on screen, they’re the ones that frame our way of thinking. Resist it. The working class cannot lose something (a sense of security) that it never had or had only for a fleeting moment.

One would easily get the impression that death, destruction, and a “Global economy in shambles, political and civil unrest” are unique modern problems. They’re not, and although they disappeared somewhat for swathes of the working class through the twentieth century in liberal democracies, these dangers were ever present for most of the rest of the world and for many in the global north.

Hot sun causing kidney problems? It’s been linked to climate change, but has there ever really been a reprieve from the heat for agricultural workers in Africa, Asia, or Latin America? If the people there simply accepted the narrative that ‘that’s life, yeah it’s bad’, we’d never have seen Nkrumah, Sankara, Castro, Mao, etc fight colonialism for something better.

Feels like the state is either trying to kill you, doesn’t care whether you die of an avoidable disease, or is happy for you to stay indoors rather than be an inconvenience? This feeling became widespread in Western media during COVID, but it has almost always been the everyday experience for disabled people and for e.g. black people in Britain, who receive sub-standard health care because doctors don’t hear their pleas of pain. Not forgetting what Marx and Engels said in Ch 2.3 of the Communist Manifesto, if activists had accepted the doomerism of earlier times, we’d have never got accessible public transport, ramps in public buildings, or wider doors as standard on all new builds (for wheelchairs), or ‘reasonable adjustments’ at work.

The bourgeoisie tries constantly to make us think reality is different to what it is. Think moral panics, folk devils, and nostalgia. They’re deliberate narrative devices of distortion.

Two points Michael Parenti makes are relevant here:

• 1. Reality is radical – so reality will win out against the invented narrative that everything is bad and that we cannot do anything about it.
• 2. We’re victims of a constant plan for the third worldisation of the the whole world – they want you to acclimatise and feel normal in this process so you don’t fight back or, at the last, feel unreasonable in imaging a better world. They want you to think that we’ve all collectively only just lost some universal peace and prosperity, but that process of loss is an old one and only relates to the dominant narrative because the world’s poorest never had the comfort to lose.

All the problems you mention could be seen as signs of hope. I’m no accelerationist, but the fact that all these problems are happening at the same time and affecting the privileged classes had its benefits. More and more people will demand an answer that only socialism can give.

The concurrence of, as you say, “Global economy in shambles, political and civil unrest, and the worst existential threat in human history in climate change all at the same time” is not a coincidence. There’s one major cause of all this. And if the housing crisis of 2007–8 and COVID indicate anything it’s that ordinary people react to cyclical crises of capital by going left (even if it’s only in seeing reality for what it is). As we see a quantitative change in the number of people with some form of class consciousness, eventually we will see a qualitative leap out of capitalism. This will not happen automatically.

We must stay hopeful and think about what we can do towards that end. Even if that’s just being there for people in times of need and, maybe in your situation, asking people to be there for you. Unfortunately capitalism makes us see all relationships as transactions so it’s easy to slip into thinking that we cannot ask for help because we have little to offer in return. Remember that people need community, and the act of helping others builds community.

EDIT: Thanks for the support of comrades. I’m glad you found this comment helpful.

“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.“ Mao

Yes – material conditions will become significantly worse for almost everyone in the imperial core. On the other hand, maybe this will make more people realize that their governments don’t give even a smidgen of a fuck about them. The decline of Amerikan hegemony is making me hopeful as well.

My country is collapsing, but I feel like I’ve always been lumpen enough that it’s felt that way anyway. What bothers me is that no matter how hard I try I can’t escape this fucking trainwreck. I’m nearly 30 years old, I’ve been with my partner 10 years. We have a little debt but no degrees…every job we can find doesn’t pay enough to live on anymore. I’ve been trapped into working 70-80 hour weeks for a fucking decade now, and before, it was not always easy but we could make it by….but now…everything is falling apart. I’m one broken bone or car crash away from homelessness at any moment. I literally only wake up and get out of bed for fear of this happening. The majority of my compatriots are reactionary as fuck, and still can’t focus enough to see the real enemies. Some of them are doing well enough to ignore it altogether, some of them just pretend and some of them sedate themselves out of reality to no real avail. No healthcare is going to be our actual deaths im sure, but until then every single day I feel the weight of being a fucking cancer of a human being just to survive to the next day…and for what? To make some assholes I’ll never meet rich and comfortable? Because I have to? I’ve come to accept I’ll never have my own home, we will never have kids, we will probably never even be able to afford to get married. If it’s just going to be this awful anxious drudgery for the next 40 years count me fucking out. I think of killing myself every day of my life. I won’t do that to my partner, I can’t do that to her…love is real I guess…but every single day that passes, as things get worse in my own life and in everyone else’s….I also wonder how much worse it’s going to get. I live in a settler colonial nation and there are so many piece of shit around it makes me wonder if we even deserve Revolution. At this point I don’t think most of us do. Most can’t even comprehend a different world, they’re so indoctrinated, so fucking convinced that the only way forward is down this bloody path….it’s easy to feel hopeless comrade. I’m right there with you. In the end, we don’t deserve this. It’s not their fault that they don’t understand, they’re just humans like me or you, corrupted past the point of return. But somehow I hold onto some sliver of hope. I see people realizing the illusion placed before us is just that, all the time. I know that if I want the world to change I cannot sit idly by and wait for everything to completely fail, no, it will only devolve into a reactionary fascist cesspool. But what the fuck can I do? I don’t even have time to fucking sleep. My power gets cut for at least a few days every month because I can’t afford it anymore. I’m over two months behind on rent and get threatened all the time by my asshole landlord I’ve literally never even met in person, I can’t give up and yet I can’t continue. I just wish I had a way to give to the cause. Communist parties are as banned as abortion in my state now. The electoral politics are useless and only the rich can run anyway. I know in the next few years I’m going to have to face death one way or another, I just hope that I can make a difference before I do. Once I get evicted idk what I’ll do. My car is broken down so I can’t exactly live in it. I can’t afford extended stay hotels or have anyone in this city to stay with. I’m at the point where I know it’s coming and there’s nothing left I can do that I haven’t already tried and been beaten back. I’d give my life at this point but only for the fucking promise that no one else will have to deal with this or anything worse. Whether that means organizing my way to prison, trying to bring back the mass line, or literal fucking combat idc anymore. Just stay strong comrade. For me. For all of us. Don’t let them fucking kill you on your knees. Fight until your last breath and I promise I will be there with you. If we give up now, everything our predecessors have fought and died for will be in vain. All of theirs as well as our own suffering will be for fucking nothing. I can’t wait for the day that “fuck the police” means “I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine”. I just hope the right people will be here saying it.

I’m sorry for format. I’m on mobile. Hell I can’t even afford internet anymore. Best I’ve got is this goddamn phone until they take that back too

Many people already replied with massive walls of text (which is good) and the general consensus seems to be yes.

So I’d like to say no, I don’t feel doom right now. It’s not that I’m blind as to what’s happening nor do I live in a utopian worldview where the future will be perfect, but I don’t feel doom. In a weird way I feel empowered by what’s happening around me and around the world and I’m excited about what might happen. There will be hardships off course but I’m also positive about the chances of socialism.

Keep your heads up comrades. Keep organizing and keep going into the streets. You’re not alone in this.

I’m a NEET without a car who’s basically given up hope of ever organizing anything worthwhile in the U.S. Currently learning Korean for… I don’t even know anymore as the chances of me even seeing the DPRK let alone becoming a guide or something akin to it are slim to none. I want to flee the country before the Trump-Carlson takeover in 2024 but have no means to do so except my partner was in a crash like 5 years ago and will get a meager cash settlement sometime soon. Just gotta figure out how to pay rent until then.

I feel you comrade. I remain cosmically hopeful about the fate of the world and humanity’s socialist future. At the same time, scraping by in the empire is making me s*icidal and national-nihilistic. It’s rough. Find strength in your friends, family and comrades if you can.

The thing that gives me hope is education. Each generation is more critically thinking than the previous.

Try talking to old people about politics. They just repeat things they’ve been told. Their opinions are not their own. Younger people are less manipulable and more critical. This is a direct result IMO of developments in the science of schooling over the past 200 years.

It is becoming more difficult to pacify a population (even with ever more sophisticated media and weapons) in a way that is difficult to reverse.

Overpopulation… Global warming. I made sure not to spawn so my kids wouldn’t go through it.