My father, whose grim glee in broadcasting the socio-political end times of the United States has only increased since his retirement from its affairs exacerbated his conviction that the state could not be saved (because he could no longer save it), suffers the myopic vision of many of his generation, for all his erudition. Namely, he and the other boomers fail to recognize that for their children, for us millennials, the world order has been collapsing for our entire lives. We don’t have solid ground to look back to and mourn.

We are technically old enough, of course, to remember times of greater stability. But we were not political participants at the time. I remember the Berlin Wall falling—but I was three years old, told to watch and remember an image on a screen as important. Most of our memories of the 90s—that decade to which it is becoming fashionable to look back on with such longing, especially for aging Gen Xers—are colored by the pastel accoutrements of childhood, not the informed realities of participation in the greater world. By the time we were taking civics classes, the towers were already falling. Literally.

By the time we hit puberty, the stability that our parents no doubt liked to imagine they were raising us into was already revealing itself to be a ruse. I spent most of a day locked down in my hated biology teacher’s classroom, entombed with her bitterness and (we later learned) her fear, because a couple kids a few years older than us shot up their school in Colorado. And despite decades of repeat incidents, no one in this country has deemed our lives valuable enough to try and save us, or any of the kids who came after us. Guns remain everywhere. The American commitment to instability has rent the fabric of our lives since we were first able to recognize ourselves as threads in a pattern.

This strikes me as I watch my son crawl around under maple trees, collecting the helicopter seed pods that fall. Discussing him and the future with my father is always a fraught process, because even as my father speculates on his grandson’s education with the weight it deserves and the generosity for which I am grateful, he can’t help but expostulate on the doomedness of our country, as though asking why are you even bothering? He never comes out and says it, of course, and he may even be unaware of the epistemological endpoint of his ranting. But implied in his bleak assessment of our national future—one which, I hasten to add, is in no way unrealistic—is the waste of time that is spent on hope. Implicit then, too, time spent on the future—in the belief that it might change, and be changed, for the better, by people like my baby who must still grow into it—is also a waste. Why are you even bothering?

I and the handful of millennials like me—there are not many of us—who are financially secure enough to have families are bothering, Dad, because none of this is new for us. Things have always been falling apart. The descent—moral, economic, and political—of the United States as a nation isn’t some sudden collapse that fills us with shock and chagrin. How successful do you think we thought our country, when our elected officials couldn’t even keep kids like us from being shot—all to feed the inferiority complexes of a festering mob of hate-mongering bigots?

The obvious assumption is that the best of the boomers—the good parents—hoped that we would better the world, like I hope my son does. Viewed through that lens, my father’s bitterness becomes slightly more understandable, his questioning of me more sensible. Why are you even bothering? I am sure my childless friends have thought it, too, at one time or another, though they’ve been too polite to give it voice.

The difference, maybe, is that boomers hoped their children would perpetuate the world they lived in. Having congratulated themselves on vanquishing racism (yeah, about that…), on inventing counterculture as a style (…), and on avoiding international crisis the likes of which defined their own parents’ generation (*cough*), the world to them looked worth reproducing, ad infinitum.

To us, though, it’s not. It hasn’t been worth reproducing in this form for as long s we can remember. I don’t want my son to fight for a future where some idiot can walk into a store, out with a gun and then into his school. Or one where a white cop can choke a Black man to death for a petty grievance and get away with it, no questions asked. So many of my parents’ generation are caught up in nostalgia and bemoaning the changes in the world, but…I don’t want to recognize the world my son grows up into. It is in the hope that I don’t—that he changes it, radically, with his peers, into a safer and kinder place than the one I know—that I raise him.