We’d rather stride grim-faced with a gun across a devastated post-apocalyptic landscape, masters of our own fates, than feel helpless within a world that’s largely doing fine and even providing for us.
The apocalypse fantasy is not about destruction. It is about agency. In a collapsed world, every action matters — finding water, defending shelter, choosing allies. In a functioning world, your individual actions are a drop in a roaring river of institutional forces that would exist regardless — and this holds true even at billionaire scale, where the wealthiest person alive still spends less per year than a single federal food-aid line item. The fantasy of collapse is really a fantasy of relevance.
Simple Picture
A house is on fire. Everyone agrees the house is on fire. Nobody can put it out. What do people do? Some ban plastic straws. Some call political representatives. Some vandalize paintings in museums. Some work on long-shot inventions that might make them rich but will make no dent in the fire. Some work on wild-eyed proposals outside of, and unaware of, the political processes they would eventually need to engage with. And then there is the all-time favorite: “Raising public awareness.”
We are well past useless diminishing returns on awareness, and possibly into negative returns — public awareness can at most create a climate of temporary acute pressure on political processes. These are all surrogate activities: they satisfy the form of agency (goal → effort → attainment) without addressing the substance. The goal is not to solve the problem but to feel like you are the kind of person who would solve the problem.
Religious vs Atheistic Helplessness
Wherever in the world religion is still a powerful force, it is customary to view religious helplessness and surrender as somehow admirable, but a sense of atheistic helplessness as an absolute moral failing. To the religious mind, a surrender to anything other than a sense of the divine is the same thing as nihilism.
This produces two crude caricatures from opposite ends of the political spectrum:
- The conservative cope: the solution to every problem is to stock up on guns, turn to Jesus, and wait for the problem to turn into one you can shoot at.
- The progressive cope: the solution is to repent for your complicity in structures of historical oppression, and it is your duty to suffer as much or more as others.
Both are religious postures disguised as political ones. Both convert the intolerable feeling of helplessness into a narrative of meaning — one through apocalyptic preparedness, the other through liturgical guilt. Neither addresses the actual problem, but both make the practitioner feel that they are on the right side of a cosmic drama.
The spiritual insight applies: the demand is not for more action but for a different relationship to action. The prayer that works is not “change the world” but “change my perception of the world.” The copes fail not because they are wrong but because they are attempts to do something about a situation that may require being something instead. Spinoza gave this its sharpest secular formulation: anger at structural forces is the same category error as anger at the weather, and the cope dissolves the moment you internalize that the system you are angry at is as causally necessitated as a thunderstorm.
Letting Go of the Solution
If you suspect you’re part of the problem, the first thing to do might be to let go of being attached to your imagined part in the “solution.” It should feel a bit like leaving a religion, because that’s essentially what it is.
This is the hardest move. The pseudo-agent has built their identity around their role in the solution — they are the kind of person who cares, who acts, who raises awareness. Letting go of that role feels like nihilism because the role was serving the same function as religious faith: providing meaning in the face of overwhelming forces. At the personal level, the focusing problem runs the same pattern: there is always something wrong — and the wrongness is load-bearing, because without it there is no explanation for the restlessness, no alibi for inaction, and nothing to distract from the groundlessness underneath.
But attachment to your imagined part in the solution is itself part of the problem. It converts genuine concern into performance, redirects energy from tractable problems to impressive-looking intractable ones, and creates a class of professional problem-havers whose identity depends on the problem never being solved. Cynicism is the secular version of the same cope — the preemptive dismissal of every proposed solution produces the same pseudo-agency without the liturgical infrastructure, creating a professional truth-seer whose identity depends on the truths never arriving. The orphaned responsibility dynamic: once you have observed the problem, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says you are responsible for it — which incentivizes everyone to either perform a visible cope or look away entirely.
Dimwit / Midwit / Better Take
The dimwit take is “the world is ending — we have to do something, anything.”
The midwit take is “individual action matters at the margin — every bit helps.”
The better take is that the most honest response to genuine helplessness is to feel helpless — and the inability to tolerate that feeling is what drives the copes that make things worse. Banning straws, raising awareness, and vandalism-as-activism are all ways of converting intolerable helplessness into tolerable performance. The performance has near-zero impact on the problem but enormous impact on the performer’s self-concept. The person who can sit with helplessness without reaching for a cope has not given up — they have freed their attention from the performance, which is the precondition for seeing the problem clearly enough to identify what, if anything, they can actually affect.
Main Payoff
The power process explains why copes are so seductive: humans need goal → effort → attainment to function, and helplessness is the absence of this cycle. Surrogate activities restore the cycle without addressing the substance. The deeper insight is that the hierarchy of copes — from straw-banning to awareness-raising to policy proposals — reveals a market for meaning in which the scarce resource is not solutions but the feeling of agency. The person who lets go of their imagined role in the solution and accepts that the river flows regardless is not nihilistic. They are the only one not distracted by the performance of caring — which makes them the most likely to notice the actual leverage point, if one exists.
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, My Climate Posture, Ribbonfarm