I'm post-doom. I doom-spent until the credit dried up and blew away. I doom-scrolled until I learned more than I ever wanted to know. I doom-worked in a doom industry that made me feel like doom, until I suddenly didn't. From childhood until spring of 2024, I was in relationships with avoidant women. I had no skills to deal with it, as I was avoidant myself. I doom-lived.
At age 68, I have literally stripped my life bare. It's no one else's fault. I doom-spent in my twenties. And in my thirties, and forties, and beyond. Why? I was insane. I guess. Or maybe totally sane. Although I had a solid career I never amassed an IRA, like any good boomer should have done. I bought and lost houses. Money washed through me. I wasn’t ready for prosperity. I had childhood wounds.
Some force inside of me drove me to take myself down to zero, to clear all vestiges of doomworld. Now I'm capable of moving into the next world, the next phase.
As we approach the great whatever it is that's going to happen, I find myself alone, but not alone. The spirits and the ancestors are right here. It's a function of being post-doom. An interactive frequency buzzes about me these days. It was always there, but I chose to ignore it. No longer.
Doomworld is getting long in the tooth. You can sense the end. But you can also sense the beginning. The gleaming alabaster city has been dimmed by human tears. But here in post-doom, the purple mountains remain majestic. Being post-doom is quite freeing.
Of course I care that the best leaders my country can seem to find are an aging mafia don and a cackling harebrain. Of course I’m concerned that my country fights proxy wars around the globe to protect it’s vapid “interests”. Doomworld still exists. But I realize now that it's simply not my problem and that there's little I can do about it, if I choose not to get into the race myself. Hard pass. So I watch, monastically, with practiced detachment.
Hemingway said he went bankrupt slowly at first then all at once. I totally understand that. I went post-doom slowly at first then all at once. I was in the universities in the '70s and '80s. I finished an MBA in 1985. I spent the next almost 40 years in a career that didn’t resonate with me.
Being a parent was a wonderful thing. But it was financially difficult. It was spiritually and socially difficult. The mothers were avoidant types. I seem to attract the avoidant types. I dutifully trotted off to work each day, flew to god-knows-where to do god-knows-what, it’s all a blur now. A passing circus. I hated my life, but pretended. That the money was enough. That the sorrow was normal.
I doom-scrolled my way through doomworld for decades. Then, all at once, it happened. The last avoidant woman left in a flurry of drama and tail lights. I sat on my southern veranda and wondered what I had just witnessed. Then the sky lifted.
Sad but not saddened. Broke but not broken. Wandering but not lost. I cut up all my now useless credit cards, and I let them have the car. I continue to rent my cool little cabin in the forest, but the expense of rent and utilities is about 85% of my total post-doom income. But I'm not going back to doomwork.
Through all those decades, I wondered as to the purpose of this life. Is this a university? Are we here to learn? Are we simply reproducing? Is there existential darkness at the end of the ride? At this point, I think we're at the carnival. I think this is a vacation for the soul. But what a fucking vacation! We chose the roller coaster ride.
The ambient sadness is gone. I think I had assumed that sadness was the background frequency of living on planet Earth. But not so. I am strangely happy. The anxiety of living has lifted. I'm post-doom! Naked and free. It's bizarre and wonderful. I'm sure my kids think I'm crazy. I'm equally sure that I no longer care.
It's too bad that I had to live to be 68 before I figured this out. And none of this is to suggest that there aren't still weirdly anxious moments. There are. But the fog is lifted.
I find joy where I never would have expected it. I find joy in walking to the local bodega. I find joy in chasing deer out of the garden. I find joy in listening to the hoot owl at the end of the day. I find joy in not answering the telephone.
I learned the hard way that it is better to be alone than to rape your own soul by just having someone around. I learned almost too late that solitude is necessary for my own development. But then, as I mentioned, I'm not really alone. The spirit world is all around, and suddenly tangible.
So where am I going with all this? I'm documenting the pivotal moment in my life when I won the fight by ceasing to fight. I think there are some acorns in this story that I want to share with the world.
It takes bravery and courage, or maybe just reckless stupidity, to become postdoom. You have to be out of fucks to give. You have to be willing to say no when for all your life you have said yes. I can't recommend it to everyone. But, if you have the opportunity to become post-doom, I highly recommend it.
It’s time for me to tell my story.