Doom or Bloom
Every morning starts the same way.
Coffee, a scroll through the feeds, and an insistent flood of apocalyptic news.
Now, I am old enough to not be scared anymore of a lot of things.
This comes from a realisation: although I lived through dark times of many kinds, I eventually got through. That’s not a narrative or wishful thinking. It’s my own track record.
I reckon I was equally afraid of things in my earlier years, when my experience with life and people wasn’t enough. But back then, I wasn’t flooded with “stories about”, “what if”s, “maybe”s. I was abruptly confronted with them, unattended, unannounced. Surprises, yes. That made me stronger, I think, and kind of thicker-skinned and more rational, too.
Today, the flood of doom is simply poured into our minds, unfiltered. That can seriously damage how we behave.
Nobody will filter it for us. We have to do it ourselves.
Our minds use fear for survival. And it’s very effective: our ancestors who did not fear the predators did not survive. The ones who feared did, and here we are now, the apex predators of the planet.
That wiring for negativity had (and still has) practical uses for real dangers.
But not for headlines. Continuous negative headlines.
Every. Damn. Second.
Real happenings are not the headlines. Real life is much better in so many ways. You do not live in the world described by clickbait headlines. And if you really take some time to read the actual story, you will discover (hopefully) that it does not hold the doom from the headline. I know, it takes some time and effort, some common-sense judgement – but convenience and a broken attention span keep us from assessing reality.
The Terminator question
Take AI, since that’s the fear I live closest to. I spend my days building with it.
Let’s assess the two possible cases.
Case A: if the machines really are coming for us, months of upfront fretting buys you exactly nothing. The Terminator does not check whether you worried enough before he knocks.
Case B: if they are not, and I’d bet a fair amount they’re not, then all that fretting cost you something real: the chance to be early (or simply the chance to live your life).
So, by all rational accounts, in neither case does the worry pay out.
That’s usually the sign that the worry is useless.
And right beside us, there’s a technological revolution.
A boom in civilisational enhancement.
By almost any material measure, humanity has never had it better. We live longer, starve less, read more, and carry in our pockets more computing power than the moon landing had.
We are living through an amazing expansion of something humanity has in its genes: the power of creation.
The salt block over the cradle
Every Romanian knows the story of the “drob de sare”, the salt block. In old village houses, salt was bought as one big rock-hard block. It was usually kept somewhere high and dry, often on the ledge of the “sobă”, the large clay-and-tile stove that heated the house.
In “Prostia omenească” (“Human Stupidity”), a 19th-century tale by the Romanian author Ion Creangă, a young mother sits by her baby’s cradle. She looks up at the salt block and starts to cry. What if the cat will jump on the stove and the salt block will fall? It would land on the cradle and kill the child. Her mother comes in, hears the fear, and starts crying too. Soon the whole household is mourning a child who is asleep and perfectly fine.
Then the husband comes home. He listens, looks at the salt block sitting quietly on its ledge, at the child sleeping, at the whole family in tears. He decides he lives among the most foolish people in the world, and leaves the house to find out whether there are bigger fools out there. If he finds any, he’ll come back. On the road he meets plenty, and he comes back home, consoled: his family is foolish, but less foolish than most.
Nobody in the story takes the salt block down. Nobody needs to. It never fell.
That is why “drob de sare” became a Romanian expression for a disaster that exists only as a “what if”: grief, in full, for something that hasn’t happened, and most likely won’t. We use it ironically, when someone is already mourning a hypothetical.
Much of the AI doom talk is a family crying around a cradle where the child is asleep.
And if a salt block on a ledge really worries you, the fix was never crying. Reach up and take it down. Then go back to work.
The other old instinct
There is a second ancient reflex that pairs naturally with fear, and feeds doom in a perverse way.
Envy.
And the feeds love to feed envy.
It made sense once. In a small tribe, noticing who took more than their share was a survival skill. Today it mostly shows up when our own efforts disappoint us, and it slips in quietly.
It kills our ambition and the urge to build things.
Here’s a reframe of envy that helped me. For most of history, most people were poor. That was the default, not the exception. So the interesting question was never “why are some people poor?” It’s “why are some people not?”
And whatever the answer is, it should not be envying someone else’s success, or deciding nothing is achievable.
Better study it, and then get back to your own work.
This doesn’t mean pretending problems don’t exist. It means sorting them, and solving one at a time.
Things in front of you that you can act on: there, fear is useful – act. Things far away that you can’t move: either do the heavy work of understanding them, or notice them and put them aside.
Your attention has a budget, and doom is a cost.
Be honest about the real risks, the credible and immediate ones. Let go of the rest. Then spend the freed-up hours on the things that actually compound: learning, building, the people near you.
The present is way better than the dooming feeds suggest. The future is open and, frankly, very promising.
And the most reliable leverage any of us has is still our own ability to build something.
Don’t Doom. Just Bloom.
Bogdan Susala, October 2026
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