If you're angry and scared it's your own fault
And I have no sympathy for you.
If you go to my “archive” here on Substack and sort by “top” then you’ll see what I mean. The most ominous, dark articles I’ve written have all drifted to the top. Link here: https://daveshap.substack.com/archive?sort=top
This, after spending the last 3+ years building a platform on optimism and solutions.
Many of you might say “Ah, well, you see it’s just The Algorithm™” as if you humans have no agency over what you read, what you subscribe to, and what you “like.”
The algorithm does not subvert your agency, it amplifies it.
When I started seeing this trend, I wrote a diatribe about it on X, which then also went viral. Here’s the tweet:
Kinda disappointed in humanity rn.
I write hundreds of thoughtful, thorough, well-researched blog posts about how things will change, how we can adapt, and they get 20 to 30 likes on Substack.
I write a couple of grimdark vibe articles that riff one what could possible go wrong, and they are far and away my top performing articles.
You people are addicted to catastrophe porn. If you’re depressed and anxious, it’s your own fault. You trust your little monkey limbic systems as sources of truth and fail to override your primitive instincts with that big neocortex.
You’re barely off the savannah.
After hundreds of videos and articles that are more optimistic, thoughtful, and rigorous, I’ve discovered what every other communicator has discovered: if it bleeds it leads. Doom sells. Most people don’t seem to have the faintest iota of systems thinking or actual rational inquiry.
My best performing Post-Labor Economics article has 56 likes and 7,500 views. You know, the actual solution to the problems. My more catastrophic article, the top performing It will get much worse before it gets better? 200 likes and almost 14,000 views.
Your mind is your media diet, and it's painfully clear to me that most of you are eating junk food. As a public communicator whose income is predicated on gaining traction, why would I tell the truth when I can just fan the flames of your fear and keep your eyeballs on me longer?
No, I’m not going to sell out. I thought the first “doom” article was a fluke. I had an idea, and I ran with it. It will get much worse before it gets better. I’ve said this on many YouTube videos and I weave it in to warn my audience about what I expect, having been reading up on history, economics, and politics to understand this transition. Then I followed up with Our darkest hour approaches and, likewise, it blew up. So that's not a fluke.
You guys are just addicted to outrage and scaremongering, and as a competent writer, holy shit you have no idea how easy it is to manipulate you. When I read Noam Chomsky's works such as Necessary Illusions, I thought “surely this is an edge case, most people recognize the impact that rhetoric has on them and they make better choices." “
Nope. He was right. Bernays was right as well. (you’re all sheep)
A good writer, a good speaker knows how to pluck the stronger chords of your little monkey brain. The fear, the uncertainty, the doubt, and the disgust. The outrage and panic. I’ve resisted doing that up until now but lately I’ve been a bit more “authentic”—unfiltered, unpolished, unvarnished.
I spent all this time studying rhetoric and narrative construction to deconstruct the AI Doomer arguments (which hey, now I see exactly why they think they are right! Doom and fear sells, and the market gives them that feedback loop—keep pushing the doom narrative! You will definitely make more money!)
It’s disgusting and disingenuous. And most of all it is entirely your fault for your own lack of media literacy.
To be a little less hyperbolic, this is called negativity bias and it is extremely well researched. I just had no idea it was so easy and effective.
Trump won the election and the Democratic party sort of imploded. There were scenes of people wailing and crying on campuses. Now before you think “Wow Dave, you really have swung far right” I still don’t like Trump and his cronies. I was one of the people who woke up that morning and saw the results and my heart sank. “Well, shit, another four years of lunacy. But the American people spoke.”
We saw a quantum redshift across all of America. This was a backlash against DEI, woke ideology, and the duplicitous DNC. Do as I say, not as I do. Corporate money, neoliberalism, all of it. My wife and I have an inside joke where anytime something goes wrong in politics, we say “The problem was always neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism, for the uninitiated, is the hyper-capitalist version of liberalism. It’s basically “civil liberty, but for the market!” It’s also the status quo for the DNC and, to a lesser extent, the RNC.
However, unlike many other progressives, I did some reflection. What actually happened here? I didn’t double down on idiotic narratives like some progressives, who literally said “We didn’t go hard enough on Gaza!” Americans have forgotten about Gaza. Other side of the world. Not our problem. If your cope begins with “Well, Americans just need to…” then just stop. Humanity will never be fully enlightened. Humanity will never be fully media literate.
This was great fodder for FUD—market lingo for “fear, uncertainty, doubt.” My reaction was to investigate. I used every tool at my disposal, including Deep Research and other AI, to really get to the bottom of what’s going on. Long story short:
People are sick of DEI and woke narratives. It turns out that white men don’t like being demonized hypocritically. As a fellow white guy, I can say that I’m not personally responsible for all the ills of society. As a Jewish guy, I think it’s idiotic that universities were allowed to keep people like me out just because of my last name. All in the name of “diversity.” Isn’t racism bad? Isn’t prejudice bad? Isn’t sexism bad?
People are sick of climate existentialism. Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, it’s anthropogenic. But you know what else is true? The planet has been much, much warmer than it is today. Also, solar, renewables, and decarbonization have taken off faster than anyone predicted. We’re doing everything we can.
Gen Z is the worst off generation, beating us millennials. We didn’t think it was possible, but the neoliberal regime continued to sacrifice mental and physical wellbeing on the altar of GDP. Now Gen Z is the loneliest, most anxious, most sexless, and poorest generation in history. Whatever we’re doing, it’s clearly not working, so time to try something drastic, like electing an outright vindictive Trump.
The Blue Team is just as vile as the Red Team, only more duplicitous. Kamala ran a textbook “perfect” political campaign… if the year was 1999. Celebrity endorsements, TV spots, primetime coverage, enormous conventions, smear campaigns against the other guy. And still got slaughtered. Maybe its because the American people didn’t believe there was any substance behind her smile. And maybe they were right.
If people get angry enough, they start breaking stuff. I call this the theory of economic agency. Economic agency kept dropping under Biden, so guess what? Break more stuff. It’s along the same lines of “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” In this case, “we’ll keep trashing the establishment until economic agency improves.”
It wasn’t until this election cycle, its fallout, and my blogging experiments that I realized just how powerful narrative construction is. Just the other day I published a video and blog about how to recover from burnout. It got some traction, but not much. Then I wrote a blog post about how I was skeptical of transgender care standards in America, and it blew up.
You don’t actually want to understand the history of climate change, politics, economics, religion, race wars, or Gaza. You just want to be angry about something. And yeah, I get it, times are tough. Everyone is stressed and anxious and overworked, but no one is quitting their jobs, they are just venting on the internet and doomscrolling.
Your decisions are totally and utterly incoherent. You are making it worse for yourself with your media diet.
I’m not actually scared and angry. This entire blog post is a vibe. I’m just leaning in with my words to see what happens, to see what the numbers tell me. When some of you have read these blog posts you’ve reacted “Wow, Dave, I thought you were optimistic!”
I am. I am pathologically optimistic. I am also pragmatic and realistic. I know we will get through this, and I know it will get better on the other side. Because I read and think deeply and reflect on history, humanity and everything else.
But optimism doesn’t sell.
Pain does.
And you keep buying it.
My hypothesis is that if we hit people with the self awareness stick enough things will change.
Probably not. "If it bleeds it leads" was coined in 1890 or something like that.
We still haven't figure it out.
Am I the only one upvoting this? That's crazy.
Thanks Dave, for correctly chastising our monkey brains.