There’s a moment and I don’t know exactly when it happens, maybe it’s 32, maybe it’s 44 — when you stop assuming the future will be better than the past. You stop thinking the world is a machine that refines itself. Instead, you start noticing the rust.
And it’s not that things have objectively gotten worse. Not always. It’s that your perception of everything — politics, culture, the people at your grocery store — has been quietly rewired while you weren’t paying attention. You go from assuming things will eventually make sense to realizing that nonsense might be the default setting.
This isn’t really about politics, although politics is an easy proxy. It’s not about war or climate or inequality either, although those things certainly help set the mood. It’s about waking up one day and wondering when optimism started feeling naive.
When you were a kid, you believed that grown-ups had a handle on things. That there were systems and safety nets and contingency plans. That “they” — whoever they were — wouldn’t let it all fall apart. But then you grow up and realize you are the grown-up now. You’re the one who’s supposed to have the contingency plan. And you don’t.
You just have opinions and a bad sleep schedule and the quiet suspicion that everything’s slightly dumber than it used to be.
You start to notice how things repeat themselves. You see cultural arguments cycle like reruns. You hear people say things that were already said ten years ago, just in a different font. You see technology get faster but not better, louder but not smarter. And instead of thinking “Wow, this is new,” you think, “Haven’t we done this before?”
That’s one of the first signs of aging, by the way — not just graying hair or achy knees — but the feeling that novelty is a scam. That new ideas are just old ideas wearing sunglasses. That people are still arguing over the same shit, just now on different platforms with worse grammar.
There’s this theory that the music you love between the ages of 13 and 26 becomes your lifelong benchmark for what “good” sounds like. Maybe the same thing happens with your worldview. Maybe the first version of the world you experience as a thinking adult becomes your default. And everything that deviates from it — which is to say, everything — feels like a degradation.
But maybe that’s the trick. Maybe the world isn’t getting worse. Maybe you’re just getting older. Or maybe both are true and they’re dancing with each other, poorly, like two drunk dads at a wedding, stepping on each other’s feet while “Don’t Stop Believin’” plays in the background.
And here’s the part I can’t quite shake: when I was younger, people in their 40s seemed calm. Stable. Like they’d figured it out. But now that I’m roughly the age they were, I realize they were probably just tired. Tired of arguing, tired of hoping, tired of pretending to understand a world that never really made sense in the first place.
It’s not nihilism, exactly. It’s not giving up. It’s just the slow, steady realization that the world isn’t a puzzle you solve — it’s a mess you learn to live inside. That maybe things have always been kind of broken, but we were too young and dumb to notice.
So yeah. Maybe everything is going to shit.
Or maybe we just finally stopped assuming it wouldn’t.
Either way, we still have to wake up tomorrow.
Still have to brush our teeth, feed the dog, answer emails.
Still have to care about things, even if caring feels harder than it used to.
Because the only thing worse than watching the world fall apart
is deciding it’s not worth trying to hold some of it together.
Even if it’s just your corner.
Even if it’s just your people.
Even if it’s just your own mind.