Being Blackpilled Is for the Birds

It's also boring. And uninteresting. Despair is a dead end. Fight it with all your might.

Evidence of a blackpill phenomenon is everywhere.

These people have always been there. Those hunkered down in bunkers, canning goods and collecting guns, prepping for the collapse of society and the end of the world. The conspiracy theorists convinced every tragedy has some underlying criminal coverup at its core and there is simply no way to escape that “it” is coming for you too so just give up on trying at anything. The cultists drinking the Kool-Aid and agitating for (or falling for) mass suicide as revolution.

But they’ve lurked at the edges of society.

Collectively we’ve been an optimistic bunch — building, birthing, striving. Living.

But now, it seems to me, that the blackpilled are a growing and normalized cohort. It’s reflected in the media headlines, our laws, our collective choices, our popular podcasters and many social media “influencers.”

Certainly on social media, which I engage in far too frequently, it is everywhere. Hence the term “doomscrolling.”

At its core, being blackpilled is about fatalistic nihilism — the belief that society and humans are hopelessly corrupt and collapse is definitely coming, it’s just a matter of when.

• AI is the end!

• Trump is a fascist, we live under fascism and he’ll never leave office so this is how we live now!

• There’s a trans genocide!

• Our food is poisoning us, the government is killing us and climate change is THE existential threat (or AI) so c’mon kids, throw some tomato soup on those priceless works of art!

They are on the left and the right and everywhere in between. They are a class of people unto themselves. And I’m so over it. Yawn. They think they are so interesting, so insightful, so much smarter than the rest of us who are out here enjoying our lives. Joke’s on them I guess!

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Research confirms news coverage has become more pessimistic, a trend that affects our perception of reality and invites doomsday-ism.

In the digital age, algorithms and ad-driven models reward highly emotional or outrageous headlines with more clicks. So yes, the media is incentivized towards negativity. That clouds our thinking, tilting us towards the dark side. No doubt.

And it’s not like I’m asking for a pollyanna view of the world. I get it, shit can seem really fucked up.

But seriously people, things are not worse than ever.

There is sunshine, and beauty, and hope that tomorrow will be better than today. Not to be too cliché, but there are children being born, there is laughter in the air if you care to listen for it, there’s a game that might be fun to watch, a tennis partner waiting at the courts, a friend that would love to give you a hug, a book that will bring you new insight, a delicious steak begging to be thrown on the grill, and a dinner party waiting to be had! Cheers!

But for an ever-growing cohort that has been normalized in the mainstream culture, they certainly don’t see it that way. They blunt their feelings with “mood-stabilizing” drugs; they opt out of having children; they opt out of living entirely. They are mad and sad and they won’t be satisfied until you are too.

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More and more people are choosing not to have children. What demonstrates less hope for the future than choosing not to create the people that will inhabit it? If you willingly sacrifice the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a child — your child — you give up the opportunity to see wonder everywhere.

Childlessness Among U.S. Women by Age Group (2014 vs. 2024)

• Ages 20–24: 75% childless in 2014 → 85% in 2024

• Ages 25–29: 50% childless in 2014 → 63% in 2024

• Ages 30–34: 29% childless in 2014 → 40% in 2024

If you don’t want children, don’t have them. I’m not arguing that the child-resistant should do it and create children with parents who don’t want them. But the rise in child resistance is the notable point I’m making. It feels imbued with a certain hopelessness and negativity, to put it mildly.

People are making survivalism a modern lifestyle choice and preparing (they think) for the end of the world, the collapse of civilized society. Why take kids with you on that end of the world journey? Or so the thinking goes . . .

Furthermore, medically assisted deaths (MAiD) in Canada account for approximately 5% of all deaths in the country, which means that roughly one in 20 people die at the hands of doctors with legally assisted suicide.

Just this past week (not in Canada) in a notable case, Noelia Castillo, a 25-year-old woman from Barcelona, died by state-approved euthanasia, in a Catalan hospital. She had been sexually assaulted and attempted suicide in 2022, which left her paralyzed. Under Spain’s 2021 euthanasia law, her request was medically approved in 2024, but her father fought it through Spanish courts.

Courts upheld her right to die, and she received a lethal injection. There is widespread speculation that as the date neared, doctors pushed her towards it as her organs had already been allocated to those in need. If true, it’s gruesome beyond belief.

The case is widely seen as tragic because a young rape victim, failed for years by everyone around her, was effectively “helped to die” by the state rather than given care to rebuild her life. It’s a dark tale. Underpinning it is the idea that even the state would nudge us more towards death — even at 25 — than towards the potential for a fruitful life.

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The blackpilled sensibility seems to infiltrate everything.

This worldview, this outlook, quietly kills the one thing that actually moves life forward: our own decision to keep trying. Our own choice to find joy and meaning in everyday life.

The term describes a worldview that has hardened into certainty — everything is rigged, every institution is corrupt, every effort is futile, and the future is already written in the worst possible way. So why bother? Nothing matters so let’s just rage and complain and give up and make everyone else miserable while we’re at it.

Many arrive there honestly. If you’ve been cancelled, betrayed by people you trusted, or watched your career evaporate over a single opinion, the blackpill feels like clarity.

I could have gone there. I felt it creeping in. And I beat it back. It’s not my nature. I get up and try again, no matter what. I build. I make stuff and it makes me feel better, more hopeful and accomplished. I write things, make films, have children. I get married and if it doesn’t work, I get it right the next time. I don’t give up. There is too much joy to be had. And I’m going to have as much of it as I can, damnit. Even when I’m relegated to mostly sitting and lounging, I hope I’ll find joy in watching my grandkids play and a perfectly worded sentence in a new book by an author I like.

If you’re older and the world looks coarser, louder, and more divided than the one you grew up in, it feels like realism to take the blackpill. I get it. Pain makes the pessimistic lens look sharp and true. But you aren’t special because you are aging and facing death. You are lucky that you got there. And seeing it as a punishment that you too will die, is anything but insightful. It is ordinary. The blackpill is not realism; it is a surrender that makes every problem worse. For both you and the world.

The first casualty is agency. Once you decide the game is fixed and your moves don’t matter, you stop moving. You don’t read that book, write that editorial, apply for the job, or run for the school board. You don’t even cook yourself a nice meal. You don’t visit children or grandchildren and you don’t watch the sunset, you just hunker down and wait. For what? I don’t know. But you scroll, you seethe, you collapse under the weight of what you view as prophesy.

That passivity becomes self-fulfilling. The very changes you claim to want — better culture, better institutions, better discourse, better relationships — require people who still believe their actions can matter. The blackpilled remove themselves from the field. They give up in the face of what they see as insurmountable odds. It’s just smart, to give up, they might tell you. You’re the chump to continue to relish life’s most beautiful moments, you see.

It also poisons joy. Hope is the stubborn insistence that even if the macro trends are ugly, the micro choices still belong to you.

You can still read a book that rewires your thinking; cook a meal that tastes like love — and enjoy it with family and friends; plant some herbs or vegetables or flowers that will bloom; get a cat to snuggle with and take care of; build a friendship that outlasts the news cycle; or teach a child something true.

My daughter and I planted herbs today. I’m no gardener. But she wanted to do it, so I watched some YouTube videos on how and we did. If we fail and the herbs don’t grow, we’ll try again. It will be fun to wait and watch and water. And hope for sprouts and shoots.

Blackpill ideology dismisses all of that as cope. It tells you that noticing beauty or small victories is weakness. The result is a depression dressed up as intellectual honesty and being smarter than everyone else. You trade the daily possibility of meaning for the permanent certainty of despair.

History quietly refutes the blackpill’s favorite claim: “It’s never been worse.”

Every era has felt this in some way. The 1860s had civil war. The 1910s, 1930s and 1940s had world war and fascism and breadlines. The 1960s had political assassinations and more war. The 1970s had stagflation, oil shocks, and continued war.

Human beings have always faced scarcity, betrayal, technological upheaval, and moral panic. What changes is not the presence of crisis but the tools we have to meet these challenges. We have more knowledge, longer lifespans, broader access to education, and faster ways to organize than any previous generation. The blackpill erases that progress because it feels more dramatic and assured to declare total decline.

The blackpill pushes people toward conspiracy. When you believe the surface story is always a lie, you chase ever-deeper explanations until reality itself becomes kind of optional. And the actual, fixable problems — oh I don’t know, things like illiteracy, crime rates, potholes — go unaddressed because everyone is busy proving the whole machine is irredeemable.

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We are here. That simple fact is the counter-argument. You woke up this morning with breath in your lungs and choices in front of you. The blackpill wants you to spend those choices cataloguing reasons not to use them. Reject it. Not because the world is perfect, but because it is unfinished — and you are one of the people still writing the next sentence.

Kids went to school in the Warsaw ghetto. Kids went to school in London during the Blitz. Kids went to school during the Spanish flu pandemic.

Jewish weddings took place in ghettos and labor camps, offering a desperate affirmation of life amidst overwhelming death. There are documented, rare instances of weddings taking place within Auschwitz.

These acts were a form of spiritual resistance and demonstrate a need to preserve our humanity, love, and hope for the future. It represents the resilience of the human spirit, a belief that — no matter how bad things get, things can and will get better. So build a future for yourself as if you know they will. Even if you’re 2/3’s of the way through this whole thing. Why not? What’s the alternative?

Maintaining hope is the ultimate act of resistance, and a defense of what it is to be human and to be alive.

Find joy in the small rebellion of learning, creating, and loving something, someone, anything at all.

That is not delusion. That is how every meaningful change has ever begun. That is how every happy life has ever been lived. And that is how the human race survives.

So have those babies. Or tell your kids to.

There is love to be experienced and work to be done.