They say it’s hard not to feel sorry for the current generation coming up under this regime. I say: they don’t know the goddamn difference. They never knew what it was like to live in the “Empire era.” They were born into the crumbling structure and have seen it decay only further ever since. Hence, their level of desensitization being like no previous generation’s. Oh sure, they might get exposed to “videos and images of the past,” leading them to believe the “olden days” were better (which, of course they were), but, at their core, they can’t really miss what they never knew. Never experienced. Only those who remember what it was like before “the dive” can truly understand why the present is so horrible. So utterly nightmarish. I am one of those people. “Just a girl” named Farrah (after my mother’s favorite Angel) who has lived in two centuries, the twentieth and the twenty-first. Having experienced both, I can categorically say the late twentieth was better. Hell, even the early twenty-first (with 9/11 and all). But this, whatever this is now, is an undeniable atrocity. A harbinger of how it can only get worse.

Yet as I walk the streets of Paris, where I have lived as an expatriate specter for the past five years, I see no signs of anyone adhering to Henny Penny’s accurate declaration that the sky is falling. But then, how could the younger generation know? To them, the sky falling is the baseline for how it’s always been. As for the older generations, the ones older than me, they’ve reached a state of blasé numbness (which probably began somewhere around the time of mai ‘68). Contented to enjoy being probably the last ilk to relish the later-in-life delights of a pension, so why not live it up during their final years and stop bothering to worry? Stop bothering to get depressed over “the way it was” versus “the way it is.” I wish I could be at that level. The level that only the young or the much older seem capable of achieving. But for those of us caught in between, the reconciliation between what is and what was feels like a daily mind fuck. You know, apart from the general political upheaval which causes that anyway.

Beyond that “generalness,” there are also so many specific things—specific scenes—to fuck with the mind on a day-to-day basis. For me, on this day, it was the sight of a little girl standing in front one of the city’s many signature newsstands (or “newspaper kiosks”)—itself a decidedly twentieth century entity—staring at an advert for Kérastase with Sydney Sweeney as its spokesperson, its “brand ambassador.” But that wasn’t the jarring aspect of the scene. Granted, it is always jarring to see the level of worship radiating from impressionable single-digit-aged girls who look at women like Sweeney as an ideal that should be lived up to. An ideal that could be lived up to…though, to be sure, even Sweeney herself can’t live up to it on an “off” day (better known as: a day without stylists and a glam team).

No, what was more jarring than this girl absorbing the propaganda that would indoctrinate her to believe she would never be quite enough unless she bought the right products was that, just next to it, there was a certain image and headline on the latest issue of Challenges, a French business magazine that was founded in the early 80s. Incidentally, right as a certain Orange Creature was gaining his foothold as “New York’s leading businessman.” A living representation of Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman before either was ever rendered to screen…and without even a modicum of the same eloquence. The headline written across the center of the U.S. president’s ill-fitting Brioni suit was: “Face au Chaos.” A phrase that translates to “Facing Chaos.” But there is no “facing it,” only accepting it. That is the message that keeps getting reiterated to the public. A public (an American public, to be clear) that themselves “asked for this.” By voting the fucker back in knowing full well what he had already been capable of and what he had vowed to do before being readmitted into the office of the presidency.

The girl staring into Sydney Sweeney’s giant face like the abyss that it was might have been an American. After all, she was standing next to some adults with suitcases, so perhaps they had just arrived. Fresh in town to enjoy their hotel stay on the Champs-Élysées, the only location more cliché than the Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame in terms of where the most basic tourists like to be situated. In any case, if this girl in the floppy hat (or “Blossom hat,” for those attuned to the 90s) really was American, perhaps the ominous presence of the Orange One next to her newfound idol was “nothing scary” because, ultimately, it was nothing new. She was of an age where she had never known a world that wasn’t dominated by this beast (in all likelihood she wasn’t even sentient during Biden’s presidency—then again, neither was Biden). Had never known a world that wasn’t total shit.

So no, I do not “feel sorry” for the latest generation, the way so many others say that they do. I feel sorrier for my own, and for the ones that came before who are old enough to remember an existence that wasn’t so purely terrifying. Yes, that’s right, I’m effectively saying that I feel sorrier for baby boomers than I do for Generation Alpha (and, obviously, Generation Z). Because I know they’ve seen the devolution more profoundly than anyone else—even as they’re constantly accused of systematically bringing it about, particularly on the environmental catastrophe front.

And yet, when I think about how much change—for the worse—that a baby boomer has seen, it almost makes me weep more for them than it does myself, who has only seen a fraction of such ever-accelerating change (even though many people of my generation have noted how vastly different things are from even just five years ago up until this point—well, imagine that feeling on steroids for a baby boomer). This was a generation that was able to protest and demand a revolution without the same kind of fear caused by being photographed or filmed in any and every public space leading to one’s potential arrest or loss of their job. A generation that didn’t have to worry about a “digital footprint” affecting their financial prospects (a.k.a. an employer sees something about you on the internet that they don’t like and, therefore, decide you’re not “the right fit”). A generation that wasn’t so heavily monitored and studied for corporate profit. A generation that, if an appointment was made, you simply had to show up at that location at the designated time without the crutch of being able to text. A generation that actually had to use maps. In short, a generation that must feel like total aliens in the world that this Earth has become. To have seen so much alter in the course of their lives that everything has become unrecognizable.

By the same token, there is something to be said for the old adage, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” For instance, Sydney Sweeney is just another “it” Hollywood star of the moment cashing in on her youth and beauty while it’s still viable. But then, she might be among the last generation of movie stars before AI takes over the job (and the entire film industry). The Orange One is just another dirty politician, like Nixon before him. But then, this is the dirtiest and simultaneously least experienced politician to have ever infiltrated the White House. So maybe that adage isn’t true, so much as another “salve” designed to comfort the fraught mind that knows full well that this civilization is rotten to the core. And that it’s rotting from the top down.

A rot that makes no difference to this girl the way it does for me. This girl who is eventually shaken from her Sweeney-induced reverie by her parents, who motion for her to follow them down the sidewalk. The image of the Orange One and his “Facing Chaos” headline no more unusual or appalling to her than, say, ChatGPT. Because when you’ve never known how good it was, you have no understanding or frame of reference for how bad it is.