But do you ever experience a sort of diluted, personalised version of that feeling, as if your own life, your own world, has slowly but perceptibly become an uglier place? Or even a sense that while you used to be in step with the cultural discourse, youre not anymore, and you feel yourself adrift from the world of ideas, alienated, with no intellectual home? Maybe it is about our specific historical moment, or maybe its just about getting older and disillusioned, and it happens to everyone. When I look back on what we were like when we first met, I dont think we were really wrong about anything, except about ourselves. The ideas were right, but the mistake was that we thought we mattered. Well, weve both had that particular error ground out of us in different ways me by achieving precisely nothing in over a decade of adult life, and you (if youll forgive me) by achieving as much as you possibly could and still not making one grain of difference to the smooth functioning of the capitalist system. When we were young, we thought our responsibilities stretched out to encompass the earth and everything that lived on it.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney