Spending time in the Alaska Botanical Gardens during a Just Transition Collective convening. From left to right: Michaela Stith, Brittany Woods-Orrison, Gunnar Keizer. Photo Courtesy of Gunnar Keizer/ Just Transition Collective
Doomer Mentality and the Importance of Organizing with Joy
By: Gunnar Keizer
Maybe you have also experienced something like this: Feeling like you committed a war crime for buying a plastic bottle of water; or treating yourself to a spa day and then not being able to enjoy it when you wonder what the experience could have meant to someone in real need.
Maybe you scroll through Instagram or TikTok and see stories of crisis or injustice next to cute puppies or funny memes, and become desensitized. Maybe you think you don’t want to have children because the world is burning and the future is bleak.
There are so many problems in the world and it is hard to not feel like anything you do matters. Some days, it’s hard to be a human being or feel empathy for others when everything sucks.
These are ideologies of a doomer. Doomerism is damaging to mental health and personal well-being, but it also damages our community organizing, as it stifles the creativity and care necessary to envision a just world that we all can see ourselves in. I think the doomer mentality is being weaponized by those in power that don’t want the world to change away from oppression. We must combat doomerism with joy and optimism in our organizing.
It can be so easy to fall into a doomer mentality, particularly for us youth who grew up on the Internet. Our social circles thrive online, where the lines between leisure and news sources are blurred – leaving us desensitized to world issues and hopelessness.
At the Alaska Just Transition Community Summit this summer, we heard from Gopal Dayaneni who posed the question, “What if we are already winning and we don’t even know it?” He went on to say that the scale of the solutions do not have to match the scale of the problem –meaning any of our actions, as small as they may seem, can add up to huge systemic changes.
We need to hear and share the stories of how we are winning. When feelings of hopelessness set in, just being in community with one another is enough to find reason to fight for a better world. We, as Indigenous people, already know how to live in right relation with each other, the lands, waters, and other-than-human kin.
We can center our Indigenous ways of knowing, model what community care looks like, and be joyous. Our values and all the small actions we take can add up to create solutions that together can match the scale of the problem.
As we organize for a bright future, we must be optimistic and joyful. We must be visionaries and lead by example. Events that have concrete goals or products can show how what we do is impactful. Community art or days of action that bring people together can fight the darkness, and instead, model the bright future we deserve.
Hand-in-hand, joyous and bright, following the original instructions bestowed upon us by our ancestors, we can overcome doomer mentality and create a world in right relation that we want to live in.