Here's Why You Get Punished for Trying to Protect Everyone You Care About.
Even if you're a doomer.
There's a lot going on, and you want to talk about it.
Unfortunately, nobody else does.
You probably get punished for trying to warn your friends and family about all the threats we're facing. You try to plan for an uncertain future. You do your best to protect everyone around you. It's a lot of heavy lifting, especially when you're the only one who seems to care.
In return, you get dismissed and made fun of, or worse. You get ridiculed, threatened, patronized, and pathologized. Almost everyone you know has learned to equate caution with "panic" and "doomscrolling." Increasingly, activists and whistleblowers get blamed for the problems they point out and told they're making everything worse, just for being honest.
What's going on?
Psychologists have a term for the backlash aimed at doomers.
It's called spontaneous trait transference.
According to John Skowronsky and Donal Carlston, spontaneous trait transference happens when "communicators are perceived as possessing the very …