Are you a Doomer™?

[hunter]

32. I suffer severe depression. I take meds.

Even when I'm happy I suspect my unmedicated, pessimistic, dysfunctional state most accurately reflects the reality of human civilization. Life sucks, and then you die.

Optimism is a perverse unrealistic mental state, a product of natural selection that increases our reproductive success. Nature doesn't care about the wretched circumstances of our deaths, we die like animals because we are animals, the only thing that really matters is that our reproductive rates keep pace. The winners have grandchildren, and their grandchildren have grandchildren.

Yet pessimism also persists within the human population because it too can increase survival rates. My ancestors displayed a remarkable ability to walk away from societies that were collapsing. They dodged wars, religious persecutions, pandemics, and genocides in Europe by coming to America. They dodged the U.S. Civil War by moving west.

Both my grandfathers avoided the firefights of World War II. One was a conscientious objector who wouldn't carry arms so they put him to work as a shipbuilder. The other was an engineer who wanted to build airplanes, but they put him to work in Washington D.C. as a demon wrangler, a task he was well equipped for since he carried so many of his own. I'm pretty sure I inherited my pessimism from him.

My primary course of study in college was evolutionary biology. I'm comfortable with billion year timescales. I've dug up fossils, mapped geology. I can imagine what our remains will look like in ten million years. I've got no good reason to believe humans will last.

Some mornings I wake up wondering if it's time to walk... I'm a Doomer™ it's in my genes.