so I went on Reddit the other day and I saw a thread that was quite interesting the title was what's it like being in your 20s in the UK these days and even if you're not in the UK or 20s I bet you'll be able to relate to the top answer let me read it out for you what's the point I'm renting and I would love to buy a house but what's the point I'll likely never pay it off I'm paying loads into a pension but what's the point I'm going to be working until I
die I'd like to see a doctor about some minor ailments but what's the point there's never any appointments anyway if you couldn't tell this is going to be a video that is brimming with optimism but I think there's an important message to be made here if you've clicked on this I'm going to assume that to at least some degree you can relate to the sentiment that this user has posted in fact I came across a study that found that over half of young people agree with the statement that humanity is doomed and if I wanted
to convince you otherwise I could tell you that child mortality has dropped by half in the last 20 years or any other bunch of random stats but I don't think they actually convey anything helpful for most of us I want you to stick with me for the next few minutes because I think we can actually go in a more useful Direction and on the off chance that the random Reddit user for your flashy 6048 is watching this this one's for you bro so the sentiment expressed in that comment is hardly something in common and just
like absolutely everything that my generation has done they've turned it into a meeting the meme is called the Doom presumably some of you aren't chronically online and aren't entirely familiar with the doomers and so I want to give you a definition as described by one of my favorite channels on YouTube pursuit of wonder the Duma is an individual who is in their early 20s he or she is someone who feels a sense of aimlessness or loneliness and is consequently stricken with a deep despair for life for the Doomer life is meaningless and the world is
inevitably doomed by Humanity's ignorance greed and futility as a result the Duma sees little to no reason in engaging in traditional Pursuit and Retreats from society into apathetic isolation now if this description is at all relatable to you as it was for me then I want you to stick with me for the next few minutes because understanding a little bit about why this phenomenon is so prevalent nowadays might give you a few Tools in Your Arsenal to help you deal with these feelings we interrupt our program to bring you this important message so brief aside
there are a lot of people in the world right now who are materially affected by quite tragic circumstances and I'm not aiming to invalidate anyone who does feel that way what I want to focus on is instead a sense of disillusionment a feeling of disconnection from the social environment that a lot of people feel right now and I'd like you to keep that in mind when watching the rest of this okay thanks so if I asked you why has a generation in the face of these gigantic issues chosen to give up on mass you might
give a few different answers some of you might say something like this well people these days just don't want to work for what they want this generation has just decided to choose the easy way out instead of facing the struggles head on to which I would say well why do we assume that giving up is the easy option let's try listening and maybe we might reach a different conclusion entirely I find it very difficult to say that doomerism is an easy way out when it's not really a way out of anything it doesn't relieve any
particular individual of the stress and the trauma of human behavior at large and I don't think it necessarily frees you from anything this angle I feel is most often brought forward by people from a different generation who fundamentally had a different contract between them and Society at large people who lived a large part of their young adulthood through a time of optimism a time where a team like hard work would actually genuinely be rewarded what I think we see when we look at doomers is a group of people who feel one of two ways misled
or powerless it's a group of people that is bombarded with messaging that tells them that their efforts are futile they feel like the contract between society and them has been broken irreversibly and thus there's nothing we can do but resign ourselves and so I don't think it's fair to characterize dumerism as a choice necessary necessarily as a conscious decision to give up and choose ease of life because it's not any easier than any other mood of life rather it's a mindset that one develops after losing the so-called naive optimism you might have as a younger
person and some of you might agree with that some might even take the idea further and say something like this okay so I get what you're saying it sounds to me like dimerism and apathy uh almost like a rational response why would anyone bother caring when facing these issues such as climate change and retirement it seems to me like the sensible rational thing to do is to give up right and at one point in my life I would have agreed with this but lucky for me you're allowed to change your mind I would even encourage
it see I believe that most people in my age group are genuinely passionate about certain things we do face this issue however that we are constantly told that our efforts are futile and in such an environment the overwhelmingly sensible thing to do seems to be not bother but I don't necessarily think that that's an inherently rational way to respond in fact when it comes to human behavior rationality is the exception rather than the rule and I think keeping that in mind is really important when it comes to challenging thought patterns that can be unhelpful to
you the idea of rationality in human decision making was kind of the motivation for this entire piece specifically the work of Daniel Kahneman a psychologist who specializes in that area his most famous piece of work is probably the book thinking fast and slow and in it there's one specific idea that I wanted to share I actually came across thinking fast and slow in a Bookshop recently and it got me thinking about the subject of rationale I'd read the book years ago but thanks to today's sponsor a short form I was able to get a really
quick overview of the main ideas I've found that the books on short form are way more useful than like a normal book summary they come with these neat little exercises to test your knowledge and they also have references and sources to all of the material inside the book they have books on psychology science economics and just about everything else so I really do think that was something for everyone there I've used a few services like this before but what I really liked about short form is that they made it super easy for me to dive
deeper into specific areas and ideas that I found interesting and I didn't have to commit undue time and energy to learn the things that I wanted to learn if you two are interested then you can get five days of unlimited access to thousands of books and a 20 discounted annual subscription through my link shortform.com fats thank you to short form for sponsoring this piece let's get back to it so the specific idea that really resonated with me goes along the following line when trying to answer the question what do I think about X you tend
to think about the easier but misleading question what do I remember about X and how easily do I remember it the more easily you remember something the more significant you perceive it to be when we're surrounded by information that's designed to make us feel powerless then naturally we resign ourselves to feeling powerless but there is another thing worth noting and that's that time and time again the people who have had the most impact the people who've been heralded as leaders and movements have been those you've behaved in a way that's inherently irrational their behavior would
only ever really make sense in retrospect now I'm not saying that me or you is going to be able to solve a huge systematic inequalities within our lifetimes we have no ability to predict the impact of our Behavior throughout and beyond our lifespan what we do have an ability to do though is to commit to values that we believe to be true and to focus on seeing those values represented in people immediately around us whenever the kind of Doomer mindset tries to come back to me I do remember the fact that for the most part
most people will not be remembered for their actions but that does not mean that their actions do not have lasting consequences I would for example challenge you to name more than say 10 people who are actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement and yet it took the collective effort of millions of people to bring about change and I think that's true for any issue that you care about the people whose impact ends up affecting change are those who behave in a way that we would deem irrational because what humans would describe as rationality I think
is more analogous to just talking about the status quo we believe that whatever exists makes sense I for a long time was a Doomer but I do think that things are starting to change I'm starting to see the value of adding my voice to a collective and accepting that it doesn't matter really whether or not that voice is actually heard what matters is that I've made a concerted effort to make it heard within the people who are immediately around me and that approach to life has made me a lot less fearful living by values that
you believe to be true is the only Power I think we have and no matter how rough or how bad things feel like they're going to be it's a power that you'll always have so why not try and use it
