Imagine being thirty-something years old, growing up in the 90s, your first vivid memory of adolescence was watching the towers fall, you lost your first job when the housing bubble burst, your time at university marred by a series of increasingly-absurd administrative rulings de facto threatening you with ruin for talking to the wrong girl, mobs running your best professors off campus with literal torches and pitchforks, you graduate and the economy's still for shit so you enlist and make a couple trips to the sandbox where you come to understand that we don't know what we're doing there, the locals don't want us there, and your buddy got his legs blown off for nothing, you get out, ears ringing every night so loud you can't sleep, the espionage gear your unit wouldn't spring for to track the guy planting the bombs is being used on you because the Kenyan thinks you're a threat to his power, and just when you've about had enough, a halfway decent presidential candidate comes along, and every institution in the country is tripping over itself to shred Truth, the law, and the republic itself to be rid of him, and then a shitty Chinese bioweapon gets released just in time for an election to be blatantly stolen, your dad dies of cancer because doctors just quit treating patients, your leftist sister has turned your nephew into your niece, you lose your job again because you refuse to be a lab rat, and having even the tiniest sliver of optimism left.

Things have been getting markedly worse for twenty-one years. I'd love to have some hope, but I don't see any on the horizon looking forwards or backwards.