# Cruelty and Callousness - Response By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-04 Perhaps what we're witnessing isn't late-stage anything but rather the messy, often ugly passage of a nation moving through something like its twenties. Past the adolescent certainty of postwar dominance, not yet arrived at whatever mature identity awaits, and stuck in that disorienting gap between inherited story and self-authored meaning. Consider the feelings of people who peaked in high school: how they often ache for those years not because life was objectively better, but because the scoreboard was clear, the validation was external, and the future was pure potential rather than actualized disappointment. America from 1945 to 1970 had that quality: unquestioned dominance, obvious enemies, simple narratives, measurable wins. Now we're the former quarterback working a job that doesn't make sense, wondering why everything felt more alive back then. Additionally, humans almost always look backward and feel that something has been lost, because memory is a highlight reel while the present arrives raw and unfiltered. We've just industrialized this bias, algorithmically selecting for outrage and hurt while comparing it to a curated past of our best Facebook pictures. The cruelty being described is real and shouldn't be minimized. However, it may be as much about a dying economic model as it is the acting out of a society in genuine pain that hasn't developed the collective capacity to process what's happening to it. Hurt people hurt people, and that's true at scale too. It's tragic watching a generation that inherited functional institutions and experienced unprecedented prosperity now struggle to recognize their own fingerprints on the world they're horrified by, while younger people aren't rebelling so much as simply living in the conditions they found. The conflict feels less ideological than perceptual: different maps of the same confusing territory. So perhaps the task isn't choosing between nostalgia and its rejection, but integration, incorporating the past, including its genuine achievements and its real costs, while finding the energy to author something new. Not because past glory says anything about us today, but because a twenty-something who does the hard work of integrating their history rather than either worshipping or disowning it has a real chance at becoming something interesting. Whether we will remains uncertain. #### Related Items [[American]] [[Society]] [[Generations]] [[Pain]] [[Future]] [[Past]]