OK DOOMER

The words OK DOOMER in bold red capitals, echoed above and below in fading outline type, like a thought that keeps repeating itself. It is a deadpan reply to whoever keeps bringing up collapse at every party – a one-letter twist on a familiar generational retort, aimed at fatalism rather than at age.

A doomer is someone convinced that civilisation is heading for collapse – through climate change, economic crisis or political breakdown – and that nothing meaningful can be done about it. The term spread as internet slang around 2018 and 2019. It differs from simple worry in its resignation; the doomer has already concluded that the story ends badly.

Philosophical pessimism is the view that existence contains more suffering than good, or that life has negative value. Its classic voice is Arthur Schopenhauer, who in The World as Will and Representation (1818/19) argued that all life is driven by a blind, insatiable will that produces endless craving and pain. He recommended compassion, art and the denial of the will as the only relief.

Not quite. Nihilism, in its philosophical sense, denies that life has any objective meaning or values. A doomer usually believes things do matter – that is why the collapse feels tragic – but thinks the outcome is already decided. One is a claim about value, the other a prediction about the future, though the two moods often travel together.

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) Albert Camus admits that the world offers no ultimate meaning, but rejects despair and escape alike. His answer is revolt – to live fully and lucidly in spite of the absurd. The essay ends with the famous line that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing his rock again and again without illusions.

In his Letters to Lucilius (Letter 13) Seneca writes that more things frighten us than actually crush us, and that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The Stoics advised distinguishing what is in our power from what is not, and preparing calmly for misfortune instead of living in it before it arrives.

The phrase was made famous by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who credited it to the French writer Romain Rolland and returned to it in his writings, including from prison. It means seeing the situation as bleakly and honestly as the evidence demands, while still acting with determination to change it – a precise antidote to doomerism.

There is no evidence for it. The saying, that even if the world were to end tomorrow he would still plant an apple tree today, appears nowhere in Luther’s writings, and the earliest known attestations date from the 1940s, in Germany. It remains a fine thought about acting with hope, just not a Luther quote.

For friends who read the news too closely, climate scientists with gallows humour, philosophy students working through Schopenhauer and Camus, and anyone who needs a gentle reminder that resignation is also a choice. It is available as a unisex classic T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.