The Inner Monologue

When I was a kid, I used to watch old men sit on porches and complain about how everything was going to hell. Music was noise, kids were disrespectful, politicians were crooks, and the world wasn’t what it used to be. And I’d think, God, I hope I never turn into that guy.

And yet here I am — sitting in my metaphorical porch chair, muttering about TikTok politics, celebrity culture, and the creeping stench of authoritarianism. I see the news and think, what the hell is happening to my country? Then a quieter thought slips in: Maybe nothing new is happening. Maybe I’m just getting old.

The Eternal “Good Old Days” Delusion

Every generation thinks they had it better. The Romans thought their empire was collapsing. The Victorians lamented that the youth had no morals. My grandparents worried that television was turning minds to mush. My parents thought rock and roll was the end of civilization.

The truth is, the “good old days” weren’t good — they were just ours. We knew the rules. We understood the culture. It felt solid. When the next wave of change came, it looked chaotic, disrespectful, even dangerous. Every social revolution feels like moral decay to the people it leaves behind.

There’s a term for this: declinism bias — the belief that the past was better than the present, no matter the facts. Objectively, humans are safer, richer, and more educated than at any other time in history. Fewer people starve. Fewer die in war. Fewer live under absolute tyranny. Even in the United States, with all our dysfunction, violent crime is down, disease is down, child mortality is down.

But none of that matters when you feel that the world is worse. Fear doesn’t care about statistics.

The Mirage of Collapse

There’s no denying that things look grim sometimes. Social media is a screaming match. Politics feels tribal and mean. People seem angrier, more suspicious, less connected. Every day there’s a new scandal, a new outrage, a new pundit predicting the fall of democracy.

But I suspect that part of this is visibility. We’ve never had so much access to each other’s thoughts, grievances, and bad behavior. A few decades ago, you’d only hear your crazy uncle’s opinions at Thanksgiving; now he broadcasts them daily to the entire planet. The ugliness was always there — it’s just been amplified.

It’s not that society is suddenly full of hate; it’s that technology finally gave hate a microphone.

So maybe this isn’t collapse. Maybe it’s transparency. Maybe what looks like moral decay is just the human condition rendered in high definition.

The Paradox of Progress

Progress doesn’t feel like progress when it happens to you. When you grow up in one social order and watch it replaced by another, it feels less like evolution and more like erosion. It’s easy to confuse discomfort with decline.

I look around and see shifting norms — gender, race, religion, identity, language. A culture that once spoke in a familiar accent now speaks in dialects I barely understand. My instinct is to call it chaos. But to younger generations, it’s clarity, freedom, and overdue justice.

Maybe what I perceive as the unraveling of the social fabric is just the mending of threads that were always frayed for someone else.

The Seduction of Cynicism

Cynicism feels like wisdom as we age. We’ve seen enough failed promises to distrust new ones. We mistake fatigue for insight. We see history repeat and think, nothing ever changes. But something always does — it just rarely changes the way we want it to.

Every generation inherits a world half-built by the last and half-destroyed by its own idealism. The young rebuild; the old lament the mess. Then, one day, the young become the old, and the cycle repeats. Civilization advances in a series of exasperated sighs.

Maybe what I’m really mourning isn’t the world’s decay — it’s my fading centrality in it. I used to be the demographic that mattered. Now I’m the cautionary tale, the nostalgic relic, the guy muttering about how people don’t talk face-to-face anymore. Maybe the world hasn’t lost its values — maybe it’s just lost interest in mine.

The Old Man on the Lawn

So yes, maybe I’m becoming one of those people yelling at kids to get off my lawn. Only now the lawn is the internet, the culture, the entire modern world. I look at the noise and confusion and think, This can’t be progress.

But then I remember: those same old men I mocked thought the same thing about me — about my music, my politics, my generation. They were wrong. The world didn’t end. It got better, safer, freer. And maybe, despite my irritation, it still is.

Maybe the kids aren’t ruining the world; maybe they’re rebuilding it into something I’m too nostalgic to recognize.

Or Maybe Everything Is Going to Shit

Of course, there’s always the possibility that I’m not wrong — that this time the porch grumbling is justified. That democracy really is wobbling. That greed and fear have metastasized beyond repair. That we’ve built systems too big for humans to manage and too fragile to survive their own complexity.

Maybe this isn’t just aging. Maybe it’s the sound of a civilization cracking under the weight of its contradictions.

Maybe the old men on the porch weren’t entirely wrong. Maybe each generation is right that the world is ending — because, in a way, it always is. The world they knew is ending, and another is taking its place.

So maybe I am just getting old.
Or maybe this time, everything really is going to shit.