Younger internet users tend to fall into two archetypes: the Zoomer, shorthand for Generation Z, and the Doomer, a darker, more fatalistic subculture that overlaps generational boundaries. While Zoomer describes a demographic cohort, Doomer describes a mood. Together, they illustrate how economic instability, climate anxiety, and platform saturation have shaped the modern digital identity.
Who are Zoomers?
Zoomers are broadly defined as those born in the late 1990s through the early 2010s. Unlike Millennials, they have no memory of a pre-platform internet. Their socialization has been shaped by smartphones from adolescence, algorithmic feeds rather than chronological timelines, meme-native communication, economic precarity as a background condition, constant visibility, and performance.
Zoomers are not unified ideologically. What defines them culturally is fluency in irony, rapid aesthetic mutation, and comfort with a fragmented identity.
The Doomer archetype
The Doomer emerged from imageboards and meme culture. Often represented as a hooded, cigarette-smoking figure staring into an urban night, the Doomer embodies fatalism about the future, economic pessimism, social alienation, emotional exhaustion, and cynicism toward institutions.
Unlike earlier goth or nihilist subcultures, the Doomer is explicitly shaped by online discourse, climate narratives, housing markets, and labour instability.
The common ground: Irony
Both Zoomers and Doomers rely heavily on irony. Their common ground lays in self-deprecating humour about depression, climate jokes framed as inevitability, meme formats that trivialize crisis, and the absurdist escalation rather than moral debate.
Irony functions as emotional insulation. It allows acknowledgment without collapse.
Online platforms
Different platforms intensify different aspects of these identities:
Platform
Zoomers
Doomers
Platform architecture amplifies emotional tone. Algorithms favour intensity, which can push anxiety into spectacle.
The context
Doomer sentiment is not abstract. It is grounded in housing unaffordability, student debt, gig economy instability, climate instability, and political polarisation.
Zoomer identity emerges within these conditions, not outside them.
The gendered dimension
Doomer imagery has often been male-coded, emphasizing isolation and resentment. However, parallel expressions exist across genders, such as soft nihilism, dark academia melancholy, “Burnt-out gifted kid” narratives, quiet quitting and anti-hustle discourse.
The emotional register differs, but the structural anxiety overlaps.
The aesthetics of decline
Doomer culture overlaps with the digital aesthetics of liminal spaces, empty cityscapes, VHS distortion, nighttime ambiance, and muted colour palettes. These visuals convey a sense of suspended time and stalled progress.
Doomer culture can become a gateway toward reactionary narratives, conspiracy spaces, anti-institutional extremism, and black-pill ideology. When fatalism turns from humour to certainty, their vulnerability to manipulation increases.
Zoomers, instead, are not inherently radicalized. However, high digital immersion increases their exposure to persuasive ecosystems.
Countercurrents: optimistic zoomers
Mental health and visibility
Unlike previous generations, Zoomers publicly discuss topics such as anxiety and depression, therapy and medication, burnout, and identity struggles. This visibility reduces stigma but can also normalize distress as a baseline.
How Zoomers and Doomers fit in
Together, these archetypes illustrate the psychological effects of continuous crisis exposure, the role of irony in emotional survival, and the way platforms shape generational narratives. They also show how meme culture and lived reality are merging.
Zoomers and Doomers views of life are less about age and more about environmental conditioning.
Doomers represent the mood of stalled futures. Zoomers represent a generation learning to operate inside that mood. The internet amplifies both despair and resilience, sometimes in the same feed.