“There’s nothing so stable as change.”

Bob Dylan

There is a museum of almosts in my mind and it is the most all consuming thing to ever exist. How many times were we told: these are the best years of your life! I think about it in the shower as my skin turns red, in the bus while inspecting my saggy wet bellbottom jeans…Surely there has to be more to this? 

I remember wanting one particular version of my life so badly that I mistook proximity for arrival. The right city, the right conversations, the right clothes hanging. From the outside it looked like momentum. From the inside it felt strangely still, like I had already ticked every main goal I had for myself and was forcing myself to sit still whilst I expected new inspiration to strike for my next accomplishable dream. I didn’t feel devastated when it failed. I felt embarrassed that I had once believed this was the door. Still, I know that if I had even slightly changed any of my decisions, I could’ve regretted this for the rest of my life. 

“Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private life so he could copy from example.”

Sally rooney, normal people

There comes a time where everything is new. You’ll do something you’ve done before but it’s like in this instance life is trying to get one precise message to you; like the sun setting a different way, with your favourite colour in the sky or the right song unexpectedly playing at the right time on shuffle.
We are so focused on our future that we seem to forget how much of what we once wished for we now have. There is so much change and so much perseverance of the seasons at the same time, you can die every winter if you so please and await spring from your bed and trust that the world goes on all the same. When the last day of January came I realised there was nothing I cried about from last May that remained, and half of it I had forgotten. You know, just another day at the time passing factory.

If there is a defining feeling of this decade, it is disillusionment without surprise. We are exhausted, but not shocked. We are nostalgic for things that barely happened, grieving futures that were promised with the certainty of weather forecasts. We were raised on narratives of progression (linear, merit-based, inevitable) and now find ourselves circling the same questions with better vocabulary and worse odds.

This is where my favourite rat comes in.

The film is often misremembered as a comforting fantasy about talent rising above circumstance. But that is not its real thesis. Ratatouille is about escape from the rat race that turns out to be impossible in the way you imagined. Rémy dreams not just of cooking, but of legitimacy—of accessing a world that exists adjacent to him, one he has read about, fantasised about, internalised. When he finally gets there, everything has already shifted. The kitchen is hostile, the rules arbitrary, the gatekeepers suspicious. Even when he succeeds, he cannot inhabit success in the form he envisioned. He remains a rat. He must redefine what winning looks like.

That, perhaps, is the quiet tragedy of our generation. We were told to dream big, but not warned that by the time we arrived, the dream would have been rebranded, downsized, or rendered obsolete. We are trying to exit the rat race only to discover that the adjacent lanes are just better-lit versions of the same maze.

This creates a fixation on character consistency. We want to be Amys or Jos or soldiers, poets, kings—legible archetypes with stable arcs. We are obsessed with “staying true to ourselves” even as the conditions that shaped that self no longer exist. Do we go against the current, or learn how to play the game better? The problem is that the game keeps changing its rules while insisting they were always this way.

This tension becomes particularly brutal when filtered through gender.

The muse versus the artist remains a live dilemma. Despite the myth of a post-post-feminist world, ambition is still deeply gendered. Many women are taught, subtly, persistently, that being desired is safer than being authoritative, that inspiration is more palatable than authorship. The ego can be fed either way, but only one comes with ownership. If there is truth to the idea that writing about someone grants them a form of immortality, then many women have unknowingly canonised people who did not deserve the favor.

This is not accidental. Activism and art remain fields that punish women who refuse likability. We are told equality has already been achieved, that dissatisfaction is a failure of gratitude. This may be the greatest con of all.

“You have to admit that most women who do something with their lives have been disliked by almost everyone.”

Françoise Gilot

Gilot, the French painter remembered primarily as the only woman who left Picasso, paid dearly for refusing erasure. He attempted to destroy her career—coercing dealers, blocking exhibitions, reframing her success as derivative of him, severing her from their children. She did not back down. She wrote about the abuse. She kept painting. Today, she is recognized as an independent post-war artist whose work stands on its own, though history tried very hard to make sure it wouldn’t.

“A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as a man. An intelligent woman gives up.”

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Margaret Keane’s story exposes a different mechanism of theft. Her husband did not destroy her work; he simply took it. Isolated, controlled, made to paint in secrecy, she watched her husband sell her iconic big-eyed portraits under his name. When she finally sued him for fraud, the truth emerged in a courtroom not through rhetoric but through action: she painted live. He could not. He blamed a sore shoulder. All she ever wanted, she later said, was to tell the truth about her life’s work.

“I’m still too famous as Picasso’s mistress to be accepted as a painter.”

Dora Maar

Dora Maar was already a significant surrealist photographer before Picasso. He reframed her publicly as a tortured muse, immortalised her suffering through the Weeping Woman, a portrait painted after he raped her. This image followed her for decades. Psychological collapse, institutionalisation, erasure. And yet today, she is finally being remembered as what she always was: a sharp, experimental, politically engaged artist in her own right.

These stories are not relics. They are templates.

Our cultural references (our expectations of success, fulfillment, legacy) were built in entirely different economic, political, and informational contexts. We live with the clock of the end of the world ticking loudly in the background, armed with unprecedented access to information. Disillusionment is not a personal failure; it is a rational response. To move forward blindly now would require a level of denial that feels unethical.

Realism has become a necessity—not just philosophically, but practically. Even our modes of mobilisation reflect this. Idealism alone does not work anymore. We have watched it fail. There is a contextual problem, and pretending otherwise does not fix it.

The world is, objectively, in a bad state. If that feels debatable, one might briefly consult the Epstein files. This is not evidence of new evil, but of clearer visibility. Excess, abuse, and hubris are old stories. The Marquis de Sade wrote Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome in the 18th century, a work so extreme that Georges Bataille described it as confronting us with the absolute unbearable. Power has always produced this excess; among nobility, among slave owners, among leaders. This is why “if only the right people were in charge” politics never works. There were always people like this. There always will be.

The Epstein files are not a monster story. They are a case study on men. On systems. On leadership. Using the word monster so easily actually offers them shelter, it justifies a self imposed condition of the inhumane. But they are human and that is why their violent transgressions of the most basic rules of humanity should be seen for all the pain and suffering they cause, the consequences and cruelty are tangible. The victims exist and remain. It’s not a monster under the bed story. It’s a man who thinks he is a god story. 

There is, of course, comfort to be found in naming the rot without touching it. Irony has in that sense, often replaced conviction as a social currency. The temptation to mistake awareness for resistance lingers, passivity is after all the most readily available form of action. There is privilege rooted in this position. To see clearly and still remain untouched. To be correct without being implicated. Cynicism flatters us into thinking we are braver than we are, when often it is just a way of staying dry while pointing at the rain. Knowing how the machine works does not, on its own, remove your hands from its levers. But no one can stand tall and proud and claim that they lead a perfect life of example. Either that or they’re lying. 

“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life.”

Pablo Neruda

The Romantics believed they were living through the worst era imaginable, convinced that all greatness was behind them. Perhaps this is the human condition: to feel perpetually late to history, perpetually early to collapse.

The idea of a defining decade relies on the fantasy that lives unfold neatly, that meaning arrives always on time, with nice shiny hair and a bouquet of your favourite flowers. It flatters systems that require urgency and punishes those whose lives do not move in straight lines.

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

Miriam Adeney

Maybe the task is not to mourn the loss of a defining decade, but to accept its decay as a form of compost. We can plant new things with it. To recognise that meaning is not inherited intact, it must be reimagined under new constraints. Like Rémy, we may not get to inhabit the dream as we first conceived it. But we can still cook. We can still choose care over spectacle, truth over myth, presence throughout. Pick out the good bits from the plate we didn’t choose.

Everything’s changing and nothing’s changed at all. If this is decay, it is not useless. Rot feeds what comes next, whether we like it or not.

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