Deeply strange entering middle-age at a time in world history where things are getting measurably worse. Just a continual psychic struggle of “is this fogeyism or are things just not what they used to be?”
If you're not old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism, but sufficiently old to remember 9/11 and the Iraq War, things have basically been on a downward curve since your childhood.
Iain Banks describes it in one of his books as “the golden era between the fall of the wall and the towers”
