Doomerism, Inequality and the Politics of Hope

Last year, I found an old photograph of my neighbourhood on my grandmother’s phone. The road looked almost offensively ordinary: trees leaning over the pavement, children standing in puddles after rain, balconies crowded with clothes. She told me that when she was young, people could roughly predict when the monsoon would arrive. I laughed at first because it sounded like the kind of nostalgic exaggeration adults make when they say everything used to be better. Then I realised I could not remember the last time a season felt predictable. I remember heat warnings, sudden rain, waterlogged roads, afternoons when going outside felt physically hostile. My generation has grown up learning weather through notifications rather than through the sky. This may sound insignificant beside melting ice sheets and rising seas, but climate change is frightening precisely because it is not only destroying spectacular things. It is quietly dismantling the ordinary environmental rhythms through which human beings have organised memory, culture and expectation. The climate crisis is not simply changing the planet we inhabit; it is changing our understanding of what “normal” is.

Scientists and psychologists have a word for part of this experience: solastalgia, the distress caused by environmental change occurring while one remains at home. It is different from nostalgia because nostalgia mourns a place we have left, while solastalgia describes the peculiar grief of watching somewhere familiar become unfamiliar without ever moving away. A river becomes polluted. A forest is replaced by construction. A summer becomes unbearable. A coastline retreats. Nothing necessarily disappears overnight, yet something recognisable has been lost. I think this is one reason climate change can feel strangely difficult to explain to people who expect catastrophe to look dramatic. We are taught to recognise destruction when something burns, collapses or vanishes. We are less prepared for destruction that arrives as a gradual alteration of the things we thought would remain constant. Climate change can make home itself feel temporally unstable: physically present, emotionally altered.

That instability becomes even more disturbing when combined with shifting baseline syndrome, the tendency for each generation to accept the environmental conditions it grows up with as normal. A child who has never seen a particular bird does not necessarily experience its absence as a loss. A teenager who has never known a predictable winter cannot mourn the winter they never experienced. This means ecological degradation can hide itself inside memory. Every generation inherits a slightly diminished world and calls that diminished world ordinary. The danger is not simply that nature disappears; it is that our definition of nature quietly shrinks with it. We could eventually become remarkably adaptable to ecological decline, not because humanity has solved it, but because human memory is frighteningly good at lowering its expectations. What previous generations considered abnormal can become our baseline, and what we consider normal can become the historical record of something already lost.

Perhaps this explains the strange humour surrounding climate catastrophe among young people. We joke that we are “cooked.” We turn heatwaves into memes, flooded streets into Instagram stories and apocalyptic headlines into content to consume between assignments. It is easy to dismiss this as adolescent irresponsibility, but climate doomerism deserves more serious attention. Doomerism is not simply believing climate change is bad; it is the conviction that catastrophe has become so inevitable that meaningful action is almost pointless. There is an emotional logic to it. If the future is already ruined, then disappointment becomes impossible. If nothing can be saved, there is nothing left to fail at saving. Cynicism can begin to feel like intellectual maturity. Yet politically, this attitude can become extraordinarily convenient. A population convinced that collapse is inevitable is a population less likely to demand difficult structural change. Despair can become a form of political paralysis, and political paralysis is not neutral when powerful institutions are perfectly capable of continuing business as usual.

At the same time, we have created an extraordinarily individualised climate morality. I have watched people argue over plastic straws, reusable bottles and shopping bags as though civilisation will be saved by producing sufficiently virtuous consumers. Personal responsibility matters, but there is something deeply strange about reducing a planetary crisis to the ethics of individual shopping baskets. The person choosing between two products at a supermarket does not possess the same power as a corporation choosing an energy source, a government designing transport infrastructure or an industry lobbying against regulation. The language of the carbon footprint itself became powerful partly because it made climate responsibility feel personal and measurable. But the climate crisis is also a problem of systems, ownership and political power. We have become very good at asking individuals to reduce their footprints while being much less comfortable asking who designed the road everyone is forced to drive on.

This becomes particularly disturbing when we look at adaptation. We often describe adaptation as an uncomplicated good: build flood barriers, install cooling systems, strengthen infrastructure, move vulnerable communities, develop drought-resistant crops. But adaptation is not automatically equitable. Consider something as mundane as air-conditioning. For a wealthy household, rising temperatures can mean a higher electricity bill and a cooler bedroom. For an outdoor worker, a person living in an overcrowded home, or a community facing unreliable electricity, the same heat can mean lost wages, dehydration, illness or death. Cooling is increasingly becoming a private commodity rather than a universal form of protection. The future could therefore contain an extraordinary contradiction: two people experiencing exactly the same heatwave while inhabiting completely different climates because one can purchase insulation, electricity, clean water and air-conditioning and the other cannot. Climate change does not merely ask how hot the world becomes. It asks who can afford to escape the heat.

This inequality extends into the geography of where people can safely live. Climate gentrification describes the displacement that can occur when wealthier populations move towards areas perceived as safer from climate risks, driving up land prices and pushing existing communities elsewhere. A neighbourhood can therefore become valuable not because it has become more beautiful, but because another neighbourhood has become dangerous. Even safety can become a luxury product. We already understand economic inequality through differences in housing, education and healthcare; climate change adds another layer in which access to a tolerable physical environment itself becomes unequally distributed. The uncomfortable question is no longer simply whether people will have to move. It is whether the people most responsible for creating climate risk will be the same people most capable of moving away from it.

Then there is the quieter crisis of insurance. A place can remain physically inhabited while becoming financially impossible to inhabit. As floods, storms, fires and extreme weather increase risks, insurers can raise premiums or withdraw coverage altogether. This creates a strange new form of climate vulnerability: the house is still standing, the street is still there, but the economic system surrounding them begins to say that staying is no longer viable. Climate change can therefore destroy a home without destroying the building itself. A mortgage, an insurance policy, a crop loan or a local business can become the mechanism through which environmental risk becomes economic displacement. We often imagine climate refugees as people fleeing visibly submerged islands. We should also imagine the family leaving because their home can no longer be insured.

The global injustice becomes harder to ignore when we remember that historical responsibility and present vulnerability are distributed so unevenly. Communities that have contributed relatively little to cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions can face some of the most severe consequences of climate disruption. Climate change therefore cannot be discussed only as a universal human problem, because “humanity” is not a morally or economically uniform actor. The emissions associated with industrialisation, mass consumption and fossil-fuel development have accumulated over generations, while the consequences are increasingly experienced by people whose historical contribution was far smaller. Calling climate change a tragedy for “all of us” is emotionally appealing, but it can flatten responsibility. We are all on the planet. We did not all create the crisis equally.

Meanwhile, the internet has transformed the way this crisis enters our minds. A wildfire in one country, a flood in another and a heatwave somewhere else can appear on the same screen within minutes. The algorithm does not distinguish between witnessing catastrophe and consuming catastrophe. A burning forest can sit beside a celebrity advertisement, a war video beside a skincare tutorial, a climate report beside a meme. This constant compression of suffering into an endless feed creates a psychological problem that previous generations did not experience at the same scale: disaster fatigue. When everything is urgent, nothing remains emotionally urgent for long. We scroll past the apocalypse because the apocalypse has become part of the interface.

This is where technology creates another strange contradiction. Artificial intelligence can now generate breathtaking images of possible climate futures: drowned cities, restored forests, solar-powered utopias, landscapes after ecological collapse. We can visualise futures faster than governments can legislate them. But an image of a sustainable city is not a sustainable city. We are developing extraordinary technologies for simulating possibility while struggling with the much older technology of collective political will. There is a danger that climate activism itself becomes aesthetic: beautiful infographics, green branding, carefully composed photographs of protests, viral slogans and AI-generated visions of an eco-friendly future. Visibility can feel like impact because both happen on screens. But a post can receive a million views without changing a single regulation. A photograph of a flooded street can make us feel that we have witnessed something without requiring us to remain accountable to the people standing in the water.

This is particularly uncomfortable for my generation because we are simultaneously told that we are the future and that the future is in danger. We are expected to choose careers, build relationships, study, dream and make ten-year plans while being repeatedly shown scientific projections of a world that may be radically different from the one we inherited. Climate anxiety is therefore not simply fear of extreme weather. It can be anticipatory grief: mourning futures before we know whether we will lose them. A teenager can grieve for an animal they may never see, a coastline they may never visit, a climate they may never experience, children they have not had, or a version of adulthood that has not yet arrived. There is something uniquely cruel about asking young people to “dream big” while simultaneously making them feel that the physical world available for those dreams is shrinking.

But I do not think the answer is optimism. Optimism can be as intellectually lazy as despair when it refuses to look directly at evidence. Telling young people that everything will be fine is not hope; it is reassurance. Hope is more difficult. Hope means admitting that some damage cannot be reversed, some species cannot be brought back, some communities will be displaced and some futures have already been lost, while refusing to conclude that therefore nothing matters. It means understanding that preventing the next degree of warming still matters even if previous warming cannot be undone. It means recognising that saving one ecosystem is meaningful even if the entire planet cannot be restored to some imaginary pre-industrial perfection. The purpose of climate action cannot be to guarantee a happy ending. It must be to refuse unnecessary suffering wherever we still have the power to prevent it.

Perhaps that is the lesson hidden inside my grandmother’s photograph. I cannot bring back every season that has changed, and I cannot personally determine the trajectory of global emissions. But I can refuse the intellectual comfort of pretending that individual virtue is enough, just as I can refuse the emotional comfort of believing that nothing matters. I can demand better from governments while questioning corporations, learn the difference between adaptation and justice, recognise when activism becomes performance, and resist the seductive idea that cynicism is proof of intelligence. Most importantly, I can refuse to let catastrophe become my generation’s baseline.

The most dangerous inheritance of climate change may not be a hotter planet alone. It may be a generation trained to expect less from the future: less biodiversity, less stability, less justice, less possibility. If shifting baselines teach us to accept a diminished world and doomerism teaches us that resistance is pointless, then the struggle against climate change is also a struggle over imagination. We need to imagine futures that are not merely survivable but worth inhabiting, and then build the political structures capable of making those futures less fictional. I do not know whether my generation will succeed. Nobody can honestly promise that we will. But perhaps certainty was never the condition for responsibility. We do not stop trying to save a drowning person because we cannot guarantee that they will survive. We reach for them because, at that moment, the fact that we might still be able to help is enough. So perhaps the question climate change leaves my generation is not whether we can save everything. It is whether, knowing that we cannot save everything, we will still have the courage to decide what must not be lost.

WriteToWin Monsoon 2026