Doom Loop

It’s a cycle where problems lead to more problems and a situation spirals into destruction. From Investopia:

A doom loop describes a situation in which one negative action or factor triggers another, which in turn triggers another negative action or causes the first negative factor to worsen, continuing the cycle. It is equivalent to a vicious cycle in which a downward trend becomes self-reinforcing. The term was popularized in the 2001 management book Good to Great by Jim Collins.

I was trying to find out if this is different than a vicious cycle, so I looked that up:

one trouble leads to another that aggravates the first

Wikipedia says this:

A vicious circle (or cycle) is a complex chain of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop, with detrimental results

And for feedback loop:

feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop.

So, no, I didn’t think there’s a difference: “doom loop” and “vicious cycle” are basically the same thing.

Why I Looked It Up

The San Francisco Chronicle published an editorial: Cities are struggling. San Francisco could be in for the biggest ‘doom loop’ of all

In the article, they actually provided a definition:

Doom loop (noun) – A scenario in which one negative development causes another negative development, which then makes the first problem worse. A vicious cycle.

Right there, they include the phrase “vicious cycle.”