[Ayoob]

I met the guy once. I have no idea what to say about him.

I'm not going to judge the guy for killing himself. I believe he was profoundly unhappy for three big reasons and he just couldn't deal anymore. I wonder if he didn't have a little bipolar II w/psychotic features and some narcissism. If he would have got some help, maybe he would have been happier.

[PhebaAndThePilgrim]

Good day: I don't post much any more. I lurk mostly, reading posts.
I just had to post on this subject. I always listened to Mike's show. I could hear him going down. He spent more and more time in the spiritual realm of Collapse. He was not preparing for Collapse, he was preparing for his own death.
While I agree that it is unhealthy to constantly live in a state of fear and morbid doom, it is also unhealthy to bury one's head in the sand.
There are times I wish I did not know as much as I did. But I know I need to know. I have adopted an attitude I picked up from Derrick Jensen. It goes something like this:
"we're F**%$#$, Life is beautiful". Can't fix it, can't change it, just enjoy the ride.
I think Mike got too personally involved. he never figured out he could not fix or change it, and by the time he realized that, which I picked up from listening to his show, it was too late. He was worn out, worn down, and defeated.
It is easy to be a pollyanna when your belly is full, and you have a secure life. Mike had nothing. He lost most of his belongings, his apartment, his car. All he had was a dog and a few personal objects.
All of this happened at a hard time in life for most of us. I am going to be 59 in June. The Pilgrim is 60. I have a myriad of health problems. Fortunately, the pilgrim is healthy, but he is slowing down. It's a tough time, and I can't imagine being in Mike's shoes.
Being that age, and having nothing, not even a home.
One thing to note: Mike expected some income from his 2009 movie; "Collapse". Sales were poor because the movie was pirated one million times.
I suggest viewing some photos of Mike in 2009, and then view him in his latest VICE videos. The change is appalling.
This isn't just depression, or too much doomerism. This is a man whose life and body have fallen apart.
At first when I saw the VICE videos I thought he was drinking again. But, his mannerisms just did not fit that scenario.
Actually, he put me to mind of how my Mom looked about the time she was diagnosed with cancer. Just my take on it.
Anyway, he was clearly a very physically unwell man.
Too me he just seemed worn down. I don't think it is fair to blame all of his problems on mental illness or "doomerism".
To me it seems like he had a host of problems, depression being one of them, and he became overwhelmed by them.

RIP, Mike.
Pheba.

We call it a conspiracy theory because it has not been proven,... yet.

To be sane during a time of insanity is to be insane.

[Pops]

Pretty good article in Newsweek from last year:

We know, thanks to a growing body of research on suicide and the conditions that accompany it, that more and more of us are living through a time of seamless black: a period of mounting clinical depression, blossoming thoughts of oblivion and an abiding wish to get there by the nonscenic route. Every year since 1999, more Americans have killed themselves than the year before, making suicide the nation’s greatest untamed cause of death. In much of the world, it’s among the only major threats to get significantly worse in this century than in the last....

This year, America is likely to reach a grim milestone: the 40,000th death by suicide, the highest annual total on record, and one reached years ahead of what would be expected by population growth alone. We blew past an even bigger milestone revealed in November, when a study lead by Ian Rockett, an epidemiologist at West Virginia University, showed that suicide had become the leading cause of “injury death” in America. ...

This development evades simple explanation. The shift in suicides began long before the recession, for example, and although the changes accelerated after 2007, when the unemployment rate began to rise, no more than a quarter of those new suicides have been tied to joblessness, according to researchers. Guns aren’t all to blame either, since the suicide rate has grown even as the portion of suicides by firearm has remained stable.

[Sixstrings]

The thing with doomerism is that you've just got to work through all those stages of grief -- can't stay in that constant panic / worry state.

You must come to the end of that cycle, which is acceptance.

Someone in the thread posted "tell that to the 60% unemployed youth in Spain who have no future." Well, that's true, these issues are real and they matter but you've just to got get to acceptance about them *and move on and find happiness anyway*.

We're primates for goodness sake. We're designed to find some happiness even if we're naked in a jungle living off berries.

Go hiking. Go to the beach. Look up at the blood moon in wonder. Find a hobby, find love; our time on earth is short, ENJOY it and savor it.

Make sure you've got someone to hold and care for, and someone to hold and care for you, that's what matters in life and what everyone really needs -- it's as necessary as gasoline and food.

[mmasters]

I too was a doomer part awakened by Mike. For me I see a familiar story here. I got myself wrapped up in the doomer mindset to the point where I started entertaining conspiracies about everything. In this mindset you can eventually reach the point where mentally there's a boogeyman behind every corner and where the only option left is to take yourself out. I think this is what happened to Mike along with the fact he was suffering from a delusional and untreated form of paranoid schizophrenia.

I too suffer from delusional paranoid schizophrenia and eventually proper medication and acceptance helped me get out of the mindset I can see Mike was grasping onto.

I knew he had gone off the rails a few years ago when he was making to the date predictions about the coming financial collapse, which never happened.

Far as peak oil nowadays I see that oil and fractional reserve banking go hand in hand. Oil provides substantial energy which translates into a significant amount of "work" which goes in hand with printing of electronic money quite well. It will be a slow collapse scenario that will take decades to play out and the collapse will affect those in the lower ranks of society first.

But anyways I'm evidence that the doomer mindset can lead down the path of mental illness. If you're stuck in this mindset and can't gain a proper acceptance of things consider getting some help (and don't give up if the first few medications give you crappy results). You can regain a more positive and accepting view on things and learn to enjoy life again.

[ennui2]

BTW, the larger issue of 21st century paranoia has impacted my life in a very personal way.

When I first moved back to Massachusetts to be closer to family, they didn't know about my doomerism. I came out to my sister first, and then the rest of my family. Well, I don't know if there's a connection in all this, but since then I've managed to compartmentalize my doomerism but my sister is now the doomer, but not because she's read Catton or Lovelock, but because she's caught in the web of people like Alex Jones. It's really driven a wedge between us where I'm afraid to talk to her anymore because she just loves to go off on the Kennedy assassination and the Bilderberger Group. It was the sort of thing that got me into endless fights with people here who buy into that crap, but now I've got to deal with it from my own sister.

There's a fine line between doomerism and truther-esque paranoid schizophrenic cults.

There is some hard ecological basis to doomerism, and I lean mostly on that side of the scale, the Limits to Growth, the logical arguments. I have a hard time with those who attempt to simplify things by blaming "them". Too often an attempt to explain things is merely a coping mechanism we use to cover for whatever mundane problems we have in our own lives. In my sister's case, a problem with her taxes that she herself created is probably the root cause of her anti-government kick.

The problem is, if you are close to someone like this, you watch them slide further and further on this continuum and you have to wonder where it's all going to lead.

[ralfy]

Finding out about peak oil, global warming, false flags during the last few decades, significant environmental damage, and the effects of increasing debt are for me enough to have a doomer's view. However, I prefer "realist" to "doomer".

[Pops]

Doomer: person who believes certain destruction is their fate so does nothing

Realist: person who accepts the situation and prepares as is possible

I've never liked the term "doomstead" - a doomer makes no effort since destruction is inevitable.

Better to call it Real Estate.

LOL

[basil_hayden]

Doomer: one who sees all this bad #%^* happening

Realist: a doomer who negotiates all this bad #%^*

[ralfy]

There are doomers who act precisely because destruction is certain, but value their lives such that they will look for all ways to survive. Some realists argue the same.

There are doomers who believe that destruction is certain, argue that there is no way to survive, and thus will do nothing. Some realists argue the same. Ironically, non-doomers end up doing nothing but for the opposite reason: destruction is not certain because problems raised are not true or because someone will solve them.

Given that, I prefer realist: someone who knows what is really taking place. One's reaction to that may vary.

[Armageddon]

MR is the reason I know the truth regarding PO and 911. Thank you Michael. I also don't buy the story. Carolyn Baker was probably warned not to speak about the truth unless she wanted to be next. That's how they operate.

[Armageddon]

Carolyn Baker? Who is she?

She found him and said it was a self inflicted wound and to not look any further. I don't buy it. She's one of MR's close friends

[aldente]

The father I never knew

[Pops]

Carolyn Baker? Who is she?

She found him and said it was a self inflicted wound and to not look any further. I don't buy it. She's one of MR's close friends

LOL, I'm sure he'd be proud of your truth seeking, LOL

BTW, I've missed your avatar since you've been gone.

[XOVERX]

I'm going to miss Ruppert if only due to his extremism. As for his mental state, you could tell everything you needed to know about it just from watching Collapse.

Ruppert has always confused me. I get a lot of joy fooling with the chickens, baling hay on the creek bottom, raising livestock, and watching my wife fix up the house. I don't understand why Ruppert didn't do something similar so that he wouldn't obsess so much.

Oh well. We all are part of the universe and someday we will all return to it in less organized form. Ruppert is there now.

[PrestonSturges]

Yes ennui2, it seems there are two threads of doomerism, one ecological (stated very clearly by Catton and Diamond, perhaps exaggerated by Lovelock), the other somewhat paranoid.

Not to beat a dead horse, but there is also the racist survivalists who have been prepping for an apocalyptic race war since the 1960s. Even in the 1914 (?) movie "The Birth Of A Nation" (romanticized story of the KKK) the whites end up barricaded in a remote cabin where they are shooting down the marauding freed slaves. And the white supremacists were really the first ones to head for the hills as a group. They've killed a lot of people, they set of bombs, they rob banks, they run counterfeiting operations, and they keep getting caught with large amounts of ricin, and the government and media mostly don't give a shit.

Sorry, I didn't want to take the thread off topic, but that needed to be said. Especially because if you start following the conspiracy subculture you will see the website sidebar ads for books like "The Holocaust Hoax." And Ron Paul dropped out of sight when he was caught working very very closely with several well known white supremacist groups - remember how his campaign folded its tent with no explanation? Of course not, because nothing was announced.

[Armageddon]

I'm going to miss Ruppert if only due to his extremism. As for his mental state, you could tell everything you needed to know about it just from watching Collapse.

Ruppert has always confused me. I get a lot of joy fooling with the chickens, baling hay on the creek bottom, raising livestock, and watching my wife fix up the house. I don't understand why Ruppert didn't do something similar so that he wouldn't obsess so much.

Oh well. We all are part of the universe and someday we will all return to it in less organized form. Ruppert is there now.

That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard