I just realized I don’t write about myself too often. Weird isn’t it? It’s my personal blog and I spend time writing about random things from game dev to shit I find interesting. I used to write a lot about myself, but I just stopped. Today I want to write about the thing I used to hate the most about myself, and what I hate the most in others, being a doomer. Yeah, if you’ve only recently gotten to know me you’d be surprised to find out I used to be a hardcore doomer. Now I see it everywhere and it’s just annoying. I now understand why a lot of people cut me out of their lives. Some people will act as if you said the most offensive thing if you try to point out why something is worth caring about and how fixing it would fix their current situation, or stop it from getting worse. If they don’t find it offensive they just act like a victim and will try to make you feel bad for trying to encourage them/stop them from making shit worse. Especially if you bring up something they’re doing, but denying responsibility for.
If you don’t know what a doomer is then it is someone who is beyond overly pessimistic. They’re the most nihilistic motherfuckers around, and it’s fucking annoying. A lot of them have found ways to make being a doomer not only a defense mechanism for avoiding anything in their lives but also as an offensive mechanism for manipulating others. I used to do this until I grew the fuck up. Some of y’all are in your late 20s or older and are still acting like this. If you’re wondering, “How could someone use this to manipulate others?” well let me give the same example I’ve seen, and have used myself, multiple times:
Person A: Hey here’s something bad happening that is only happening because most people don’t know it’s happening.
Persona B: I don’t care about that.
Persona A: By not caring about this they’re allowed to do …. which is just going to make life for everyone worse.
Person B: I know my life is worthless and doesn’t matter.
Person C: Eh I just want to watch from the side and watch it all burn.
There is no way for Person A to respond that isn’t enabling Person B, or being an asshole. Person B has used their doomer defense to make Person A the one in the wrong. If Person A tries to counter that talk with, “No your life has meaning” etc then the topic shifts to that person. You then have to have a conversation about them and the original topic is lost completely. Which does nothing but enable this behavior. If Person A answers with, “If that’s how you feel.”, or in a similar way, then Person B can/will accuse you of being an asshole and others in the chat will defend Person B and try to guilt trip Person A. You then have Person C who is enabling Person B with that comment. There is always a Person C when something like this happens. Person C is trying to make light of the situation to ease tensions, but they’re still enabling Person B.
The issue is Person B is an eternal victim. Person B needs to ignore the responsibilities/truths of life. Sometimes shit happens to us that we can’t control, that’s life. However, Person B acts like everything is like this to avoid taking control/blame. With that said, Person B will sometimes claim responsibility for shit they had no control over so it looks like they’re attempting to take blame/credit when due, but they’re not. This is something I used to do and was pointed out by my former therapist. People do this as a form of social manipulation. It stops others from thinking you’re not trying or that you can’t see yourself as the problem in situations. The truth is you don’t see yourself as a problem and aren’t trying.
Most people think a social manipulator is someone doing it from the shadows, but often it’s someone trying to make you feel guilty for them. Issue with these people is they’re usually deeply rooted into a social group and only newcomers will call them out. In doing so the newcomer will face backlash and possibly be kicked out. Even though everyone knows they’re right and that person needs to grow up. You’ll find these people a lot online. Especially among the terminally online people. If people are escaping real life, it’s usually because they’re the reason.
I used to escape from real life by playing The Secret World all day. I was a different person. No one knew who I really was and I could get away with all sorts of doomer manipulation. There were those who enabled it, never wanted to deal with it, and even encouraged it. The people who encouraged it were doomer manipulators themselves. It was an ever evolving scheme to teach others to pass the buck so they never had to accept reality. Eventually I met someone who refused my shit. She forced me to accept my faults and I thank her every day. Sadly, I have no idea what happened to her after I quit playing to focus on my life.
“What about those who are in abusive situations?” Well, are they trying to get out of the situation, or are they trying to milk it? Ever since LiveJournal popped up on the internet people have been using sympathy to garner online fame and/or money. A prime example is Zoe Quinn She claimed Alec Holowka was abusing her and keeping her locked inside. To “escape” she needed money. After she was done begging people did a little digging and found she was also uploading pictures of her traveling around Canada, on her own, and in different cities from Alec’s. At any point she would have “escaped”. She used the sympathy for fame and money. She, and her fans, then drove that man to suicide after getting him fired from his job after lying.
As someone who has been in abusive situations I never asked for money. I asked for help to get me out of them. A ride to someone’s house to escape, a place to stay overnight, and such. I never tried to get online sympathy from it either. I tried to escape. When you go around making a fuss online people will talk to the supposed abuser. That will ruin your chances of escaping. This is not something you do if you actually want to get out of an abusive situation, or are in one. A woman doesn’t go around town telling everyone she’s planning to sneak away from her abusive husband. She asks a few people she trusts for help and then does it.
The manipulation doesn’t stop there. One thing I would do is claim I didn’t have the money for things to improve my life. Like, I wanted to get better at programming but I “couldn’t afford” programming classes. The thing was, I could. I just needed to budget and stop being a child. All I had to do was not buy games for a year. I had a lot of games I could’ve played. I was a collector. Instead I spent more money on hoarding games to show off to no one. Which is why I can’t wait to go back to the states and unload some of those worthless wastes of money. Remember kids, anyone who says you need to play on original hardware is lying to you. Especially about owning the official cart/disc. Softmod that shit or buy a cart with an SD card slot to load as many games as you want. Paying someone to SD mod a console is a lot cheaper then buying games for it. Where was I? Oh yeah. I was wasting money on expensive games, and cheap ones. I wasn’t even playing them. I’m not saying you can’t buy things. Just think. Are you really using them? Do you need it? If not then could you use that money to better your life in a more permanent way?
It’s the last part that matters the most. A couple of weeks ago there was a post on Twitter telling people that learning to fix something is the best way to save/make money. People went in there talking about how that was racist/classist/every other -ist because “x people don’t have the money to learn!” What? I was dumbfounded. This was actually the thread that made me remember how I used to be like these people. No matter what anyone told or showed them, everyone came up with the excuse of “not enough money”. One click onto their profile and you see them showing how they just pre-ordered 3 new expensive collectors editions for games. They just purchased an anime figure. They just purchased an expensive vinyl. It was them showing off how much money they were spending. At any point if you made the suggestion of, “Hey maybe take $20 of the $500 you spent here and use that towards tools and YouTube for free lessons.” then they’d reply as if you were basically asking them to starve to death or that they should never have entertainment. No, no one is saying that. All we’re saying is use a little bit of that money to learn a skill. That way you can get out of your shitty job and into a trade.
Another thing I used to say, and these types of people will say, is that due to where they live it’s not possible for them to learn/improve something. Honey, you have the internet. You can buy any book to learn a skill/language. You can use countless YouTube videos, Udemy Lessons (on sale obviously), apps, and random tutorial websites to learn a skill/language. You’ll notice that I am adding language now. Yeah, I’ve seen people say because of where they live they can’t learn a language. Go hit up a used bookstore or eBay. If you truly wanted to learn the language you would. The internet brings us all sorts of ways to learn a language, or skill. Hell, you can pick up a guitar at a pawn shop and learn to play the guitar with YouTube videos now. Even if you lived in Japan you wouldn’t learn Japanese. Don’t lie to us.
All of these are different ways to manipulate others via guilt trips, especially sympathetic people, into either giving them money or the attention these individuals seek. Some will blame it on their sexual preference. I actually saw that yesterday. Someone said that going outside would lead to them being murdered. The reasoning? “No one likes me because I am annoying, homosexual, open to trans people, and weird. They will beat me up and will murder me if I step outside.” No sugar. It’s just because you’re annoying and a manipulative little sack of shit. You live in the US. No one will murder you for being gay. I grew up in Texas and no one was ever attacked for being gay. Hate crimes are pretty rare. People will blame being weird and different, but that’s never the case outside of school. Later this same person then went on to blame their autism, bipolar, ADHD (fucking what?), and more. All of it was, of course, self diagnosed. When no one was giving them sympathy they just kept repeating that we were being dismissive, despite trying to help, and removed themselves from the conversation. They then went to their timeline to cry about it to garner sympathy from others. All anyone was telling the dude was, “You said you were annoying and that’s why people don’t like you.” and, “Going outside won’t end in your death. No one wants to kill you for being gay and you’re not worth going to prison for.” He framed it in a completely different way when crying about it on his timeline.
What’s funny is you’ll find lots of famous video game designers, programmers, and artists, usually these are the types of individuals the doomers look up to, who always say the same thing. “My family couldn’t afford x so we used y to substitute. In fact I never used an x until college.” Masahiro Ito, lead artist of Silent Hill 2 & 3, tweeted out that his family couldn’t afford toys for him to play with so he would use milk cartons to make art. From the book “Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America” Masayuki Uemura, the engineer behind the NES, also grew up poor. He taught himself electrical engineering by going to the junkyard and picking out scraps. He made remote controlled airplanes from these scraps. John Romero, one of the creators of Doom and Commander Keen, didn’t have a computer growing up. His step father didn’t approve of him playing, or making, games. He would bike to the nearest college to learn how to program until he was able to afford his own Apple II. American McGee, level designer for Doom 2 and Quake 1 & 2 as well as lead designer/creator of American McGee’s Alice, had a notoriously difficult life. So much so it became a meme to say “he’s had a hard life” when people talk about him. Then people look up his life story and see that he did indeed have one, but didn’t let it keep him down.
I hate that it took me so long to learn from their stories and end the destructive path I was on. Yeah life fucks us over. Yeah people will fuck us over too. We can’t just lie there and take it. We also shouldn’t use it to manipulate others and keep them down as well. We should try to improve our situations or get out of them. I moved to China to improve my life. Sometimes staying where the misery is doesn’t help. Will moving help you? Maybe, maybe not. I can’t tell you that. Will giving up help? No. You miss every shot you don’t take.