First, I’m sorry to hear that you feel your own life is collapsing. I hope you have people or a person around you to talk to and who might be able to help. It may be that you have to put aside some of your politics (at least don’t make politics the centre of every conversation if that’s something you do), but it is possible to form a community within capitalism with people who can help you get through tougher times; it may take some building.

Try to take a break if you can. Go for a walk or sit or lie down. There’s only so much individual control we have over our living conditions, and it’s harder to exercise that little control if we’re stressed and unable to think clearly.

I can empathise and I joke about not having a habitable planet in 40 years, but we need to have hope and dismiss the doomerism.

I cannot speak for people in the global south as my experience is of the imperial core. So I cannot say whether this sense of doom is worldwide. But there seems to be an extra layer to the doomerism in the West.

I will try to unpick the sense of doom to see if it helps us to think differently.

Climate change and COVID have emphasised a vocal clique in the global north that has no idea how the most disadvantaged people live in their own countries and elsewhere. So when things went wrong with COVID and with climate change on the horizon, it suddenly seemed that new problems were arising. (We might also say the same of the housing crisis of 2007–8.)

These are only new problems for, let’s say, the labour aristocracy and the petite bourgeois. As these voices are the ones we usually hear in the press and on the radio and on screen, they’re the ones that frame our way of thinking. Resist it. The working class cannot lose something (a sense of security) that it never had or had only for a fleeting moment.

One would easily get the impression that death, destruction, and a “Global economy in shambles, political and civil unrest” are unique modern problems. They’re not, and although they disappeared somewhat for swathes of the working class through the twentieth century in liberal democracies, these dangers were ever present for most of the rest of the world and for many in the global north.

Hot sun causing kidney problems? It’s been linked to climate change, but has there ever really been a reprieve from the heat for agricultural workers in Africa, Asia, or Latin America? If the people there simply accepted the narrative that ‘that’s life, yeah it’s bad’, we’d never have seen Nkrumah, Sankara, Castro, Mao, etc fight colonialism for something better.

Feels like the state is either trying to kill you, doesn’t care whether you die of an avoidable disease, or is happy for you to stay indoors rather than be an inconvenience? This feeling became widespread in Western media during COVID, but it has almost always been the everyday experience for disabled people and for e.g. black people in Britain, who receive sub-standard health care because doctors don’t hear their pleas of pain. Not forgetting what Marx and Engels said in Ch 2.3 of the Communist Manifesto, if activists had accepted the doomerism of earlier times, we’d have never got accessible public transport, ramps in public buildings, or wider doors as standard on all new builds (for wheelchairs), or ‘reasonable adjustments’ at work.

The bourgeoisie tries constantly to make us think reality is different to what it is. Think moral panics, folk devils, and nostalgia. They’re deliberate narrative devices of distortion.

Two points Michael Parenti makes are relevant here:

• 1. Reality is radical – so reality will win out against the invented narrative that everything is bad and that we cannot do anything about it.
• 2. We’re victims of a constant plan for the third worldisation of the the whole world – they want you to acclimatise and feel normal in this process so you don’t fight back or, at the last, feel unreasonable in imaging a better world. They want you to think that we’ve all collectively only just lost some universal peace and prosperity, but that process of loss is an old one and only relates to the dominant narrative because the world’s poorest never had the comfort to lose.

All the problems you mention could be seen as signs of hope. I’m no accelerationist, but the fact that all these problems are happening at the same time and affecting the privileged classes had its benefits. More and more people will demand an answer that only socialism can give.

The concurrence of, as you say, “Global economy in shambles, political and civil unrest, and the worst existential threat in human history in climate change all at the same time” is not a coincidence. There’s one major cause of all this. And if the housing crisis of 2007–8 and COVID indicate anything it’s that ordinary people react to cyclical crises of capital by going left (even if it’s only in seeing reality for what it is). As we see a quantitative change in the number of people with some form of class consciousness, eventually we will see a qualitative leap out of capitalism. This will not happen automatically.

We must stay hopeful and think about what we can do towards that end. Even if that’s just being there for people in times of need and, maybe in your situation, asking people to be there for you. Unfortunately capitalism makes us see all relationships as transactions so it’s easy to slip into thinking that we cannot ask for help because we have little to offer in return. Remember that people need community, and the act of helping others builds community.

EDIT: Thanks for the support of comrades. I’m glad you found this comment helpful.