From Doomers to Doers: A Path Through This Dystopian Madness

Plus, updates on dew harvesting.

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Recently, Lex Luthor’s irl twin Jeff Bezos showed up at a tech conference in Paris, where he supposedly declared that humans were drinking too much water—and that it was slowing down AI’s evolution.

The internet filled up with justifiable outrage. Everyone had something to say about his psychopathic disregard for humanity. Full disclosure, I reposted some of the memes on X. (Yeah, I rejoined the platform under my old name.) My spouse and I had a nice long bitch fest about Bezos while making dinner and talking about our dew harvester plans (update on that in a minute).

There was just one little problem. There’s no record of Bezos ever making those comments about AI and human water consumption.

Just as outrage over Bezos was abating, new outrage erupted over Israel’s violation of the peace deal with Iran, prompting another Hormuz closure and another spate of viral videos about how screwed we are.

Honestly, it’s so boring…

I’m not writing this to exonerate Bezos or shame anyone for spreading misinformation. I’m writing this for a different reason.

The reason:

Hopefully, we can all agree that spending hours fuming over something that someone didn’t even say is a waste of our time. So is spending hours wondering if or when we’re going to have a supply chain collapse or a famine. It does nothing. It doesn’t stop data centers. It doesn’t conserve water. It doesn’t prepare anyone for the droughts that are actively drying up the nation’s crops and water sources. And if you can’t even trust what’s real online anymore, why give it so much energy?

I’ve noticed something in myself and others over the last several months, and it’s something new. It’s a shift. It’s a new approach. We’re not ignoring the news. We’re not living in a fantasy world. We’re not numb. We’re not decencitized. We’re not selling hopium or oblivious ignorance.

We’re just processing the doom faster.

We’re acclimated.

We’re getting right to the do something part. These days, I don’t have to spend days convincing my spouse to get on board with a rain harvesting project. I don’t have to spend all night reading about droughts to convince myself it’s a thing. He sees the droughts now. He’s worried. He wants one.

I don’t have to pitch it anymore.

So, my bandwidth no longer goes toward trying to convince my family we have a problem. I don’t need quite as much doom to validate my thoughts and feelings about the state of the world. I just need to know what’s going on, and that’s it. We’re in the design stage. It makes a big difference to have someone who’s actually helping you think through concepts instead of constantly doubting and second-guessing your entire worldview. A very big difference…

Ironically, it was nothing I said or did that finally got through to them. It was just reality. The reality of our doom has become so apparent, so self-evident, that at least some people are finally starting to wake up a little.

(I know, not everyone…)

Exhibit A:

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a dew harvester design for months. I’ve failed a few times. Last night, I finally started moving in the right direction, with a design that sits 3 feet off the lawn and harnesses plant transpiration. I’ve changed materials to sanded coroplast and silicone-coated aluminum (AMS panels) backed with xps foam. Instead of a bulky wooden frame or a flimsy PVC one, I’m using steel construction pipes that fit together with an allen wrench. Based on my trial runs, my prototype is going catch a gallon of dew a night, even in low-average humidity. It’s going to double as a rain harvester. We’re going to run the gutter into 30-gallon Aquatanks, daisychained with PVC.

I’m probably never going to build something as big as this massive dew and rain harvester in Texas, which spans 2,674 feet. But at least I know about the project. I know someone else out there is doing.

Soon, we’re going to make a permanent ground install that runs along the back of our yard. We’re also working through a hinged model that can fold out from the side of a deck or a house and rest on two legs.

So, it’s working.

This is what we’ve come up with, because we can’t completely redo our roof. We can’t install a super-expensive rain harvesting system. We engineered our way through problems rather than letting them stop us.

What else?

A couple of families in our area have started asking us for prepping advice. We’re sharing our plans with them. We’re in the early stages of converting our garage (now that we have one) into a workshop and temporary disaster shelter. We can’t save everyone. But we can help someone.

Slowly and surely, community is happening. Not because we forced it. We’re building it, and we’re attracting the right people to us.

These days, I’d rather obsess over dew harvester designs than sit on my phone, scrolling hate posts about something someone didn’t even say. I already have enough reasons to despise Jeff Bezos. I already know what he thinks about humanity. I don’t need to make up new quotes for him.

Do I regret my years of doomscrolling?

No…

Five years ago, doomscrolling wasn’t a sign of mental illness. It wasn’t a condition that needed treatment. It was a logical, intuitive response to a world where threats suddenly outnumbered hopes. We were never just scrolling doom for its own sake. We were looking for information. We were looking for like minds and souls. We were looking for friends and allies.

Yes, it was comforting to scroll through doom—but not because we were addicted to bad news. We were relieved and soothed to find other people who felt the same way, who weren’t scared to express their emotions.

Over time, that emotional venting evolved into tangible solutions. It’s where we learned about HOCl steam, a “promising respiratory antiseptic” that changed our lives and helped us reclaim a little bit of the “normal” in a world where almost nobody takes the threat of airborne diseases seriously, unless they’re briefly freaking out over headlines about Ebola or Hantavirus.

In other words, we were looking for answers.

We started finding them.

We found real answers, not the “touch grass” nonsense that got served to us during the Barbenheimer summers of yore.

The doomscrolling was a step on a path, a means to an end. The end was understanding science and public health. It was developing tools and mindsets. It was making connections. We have those now, so we don’t need to scroll for the doom as much. The bad news is there, right in front of us.

We’re done dooming.

Now we’re doing.

Feels good.