I am a Stranger in a Strange Land

Living in a Culture in Decline

I was born in 1974. The world that I was born into is gone. Making such a statement is not insightful or provocative, especially in 2025, but I think that for most people it is hard to effectively put into words just how different our world is now. The changes have been so systemic, so fundamental, that there is no going back. I find myself slowly slipping into what Victor Davis Hanson calls The Cathedral of the Mind. It is the only way that I can find to really cope with the magnitude of the changes, and with the fact that they have been overwhelmingly for the worse. What are the most fundamental changes that have happened, those that I truly believe will never be undone? They are, in no particular order: demographic, economic, and cultural. I realize that these are broad topics and that they are not independent of each other. I also realize that much of political and social discourse is spent on how we can roll back some of these changes, or at least mitigate their ill effects. I hope to show in this essay the magnitude of these changes, and how that precludes ever reversing them.

Demographics

The global population in 1974 was 4 billion, whereas in 2025 it is (officially) 8.23 billion. Consider for a moment that in my lifetime the world’s population has doubled, and even when I was a child the so-called experts were talking about the dangers of overpopulation. While reasonable people can debate how much of their concern was warranted and how much of it was typical ivory tower hyperbole, there is no denying that even in the nation’s hinterlands, things are much more crowded than they were. This crowding has led to a coarsening of manners. We trust each other less. We smile less frequently. When I was a child, it was so rare to see people on most roads that we would wave at each other as we passed.

This increase in population has not come with sufficient increases in the infrastructure needed to support it. One of the side effects to that is that now most businesses are open on the weekends, and some of them are open all night. When I was a child, basically nothing was open all night. Bars were open late, and some larger cities had 24-hour diners. That was basically it. That is why most streets were empty at night. Now, with most businesses being open seven days a week and either 24 hours (or at least extended hours), there is traffic all day and all night. Even residential streets have cars on them all night.

The population has not just increased. Our nation’s racial demographics have completely changed. When I was born, the nation was 87% White, 12% Black, with a tiny smattering of Indians and Mexicans. By design it is almost impossible to get an accurate figure on our current racial makeup, but the change has been overwhelming. All population growth in this country has been due to immigration, and it has ballooned from 212 million in the year I was born to 347 million (official). When you factor in illegal immigrants, a number that our so-called leaders intentionally undercount, the real population is probably closer to 400 million. What that means is that on any given day, in most situations I am surrounded by people from another country. They speak different languages. They wear different clothing. Their habits are different. Their food is different. This difference used to be interesting and exciting, but now it is overwhelming. It has caused us to retreat into ourselves. With the exception of the rare, dysfunctional oikophobe, most people do not like perpetually being a minority.

Literally every aspect of our lives has been impacted by these changes. The establishment constantly runs a full-force psy op against the dwindling native population in order to convince us that these changes are not happening, or that they are happening but that it is a good thing, or that it was always this way. They have to run this psy op because our own lived experience tells us otherwise. As an experiment, do an internet search of the term multiculturalism to see what I mean: you will get thousands of images of smiling, near ecstatic faces of men and women hugging each other, leaning in close, joy, joy, joy! But no faces of the dreaded White man. If you happen to be of the half of the world’s population that is female, or 85% that is non-white, you might think, “What do I care?” And that’s fair. But I do exist. We exist. We used to be nearly half of the nation, and now we are being removed, and I’d have to hate myself for that not to bother me.

This change alone - the huge population increase through mass immigration - has irrevocably changed our nation. It will never be undone. There will never be a mass remigration project. I’m not being blackpilled, I’m simply stating a fact. These people will never go home. They don’t want to go, all corporations and churches want them to stay, and our political leaders prefer them to us. They will never leave.

Economics

Enough has been written about this topic that I don’t feel like I should even have to explain it, but for the few Boomers out there and idiots who still don’t get it, our economic system has been completely changed. The cost of living has skyrocketed, and while wages have significantly increased in my lifetime, they have no where near kept up with inflation. The cost of practically all goods has dramatically increased. Don’t believe me? Let’s play a little game, one I like to call “what did things cost the year I was born.”

• McDonald’s hamburger: 28 cents (now $2)

• Can of Coke: 25 cents (now $1)

• Gallon of milk: 72 cents (now $4)

• New home: $38,900 (now $402,000)

• New car: $4,441 (now $49,000)

• Wedding: $2,000 (now $36,000)

The result of this is that basically every family has two people working at least two full time jobs. Our culture hasn’t quite caught up with how expensive everything has become, and so people are increasingly relying on credit.

The native-born population is also competing against the entire world for the jobs that we have. Corporations and the government have colluded to flood the nation with poor, uneducated people from the 3rd world, but amongst those hordes of uneducated laborers (and welfare recipients) there are a huge number of college educated applicants. So from one end of the job market to the other, we are left scrabbling for a place in our own nation. When I was young, the vast majority of jobs now held by illegal immigrants were done by teenagers or very young, inexperienced Americans: yard work, general labor, custodial work, nannies, cooks, car washes, etc. For the younger readers out there, this might seem impossible to believe. But if you watch an older movie or read an older book, you’ll see this reality slip into the narrative: think of the trope of the babysitter alone at night while the parents are out on a date, or young office women ogling construction workers from their high-rise office. Because of the ubiquity of near-slave labor through illegal immigration, reinforced with propaganda from the establishment, it is hard to believe that these jobs used to be done by Americans, but they did. Just one example: in the book The Outsiders, the main character’s older brother keeps the family together by working as a roofer.

These changes to the economy are wide-spread, deep, and systemic. Much like the demographic changes I mentioned earlier, they will never be undone because the people in charge are benefiting from things the way they are now. Our economic lives may have gotten worse, but the exact opposite thing has happened to the elites. Why on earth would they change things? Even Trump, for all his talk, has no reason to change things, and thus he won’t. Not that it matters - he’s one man, after all, against an entire nation’s ruling class. Everyone in authority benefits from this: all churches, all large corporations, every university, and the entire political class. This is why they haven’t done anything to correct things, or even slow down the economic collapse, because to them it is not a crisis. The average net worth of the top 5% in America in 1974 was $192,000. In 2025, that has grown to $1.17 million. To the middle-class American who is reading this essay, I am telling you that they will see every one of us dead before they reverse this change.

Cultural Decline

The state of our culture today has also degraded to such an extent that I don’t even feel at home here anymore. Universally it has fallen: fashion, manners of speech, architecture, music, art; in every way, our culture has become debased and degraded. Some of this was intentional, as Jewish Communists infiltrated every artistic sphere and set about deconstructing them. However, some of it is the natural consequence of the other two changes I’ve discussed. If you import hundreds of millions of people from the 3rd world, your country will start to resemble the 3rd world. It’s not by accident that a remote village in Switzerland or England looks a particular way, while one from Kenya or Bangladesh looks another.

It’s important to emphasize that there is not one specific thing to blame for this decline. It is too universal for that to be the case, and in many ways you could even argue that it’s been welcomed by the native-born American population. Consider the trope of the Boomer insisting, “Don’t call me Mr. Smith! That’s my dad’s name. Call me Bob!” Grown men and women dressing like children. Embarrassingly foul and rudimentary music. Ugly and boring automobile design. Each of these, when taken individually, can be explained away with various reasons. But taken as an undeniable trend, it is clear that the culture is undergoing a steep decline.

Progress!

One of my favorite indoor pastimes is to watch old movies and television shows. The difference between life fifty years ago and today is so stark and dramatic that my mind often recoils from even considering it. Obviously, these were not perfect representations of contemporary life, but you can glean as much about our culture in 1974 from movies and television, as you can about 14th century life by reading The Canterbury Tales, or by ancient Greece from Sophocles or Euripides. It is truly heartbreaking watching these with my children, when I realize that the world that I lived in and should have been able to pass on to my children is gone.

Like the changes brought about by demographics and economics, these cultural changes will never be undone. Most people alive today either don’t remember what American culture used to be, or they’ve convinced themselves that it never existed. Some have been so thoroughly convinced by the psy op that they think the change has been overwhelmingly positive, despite all evidence to the contrary. Are there any attempts to bring back any of the finer aspects of American culture? Do you see any churches leading the way, any institutions, any politicians talking about it? Of course not.

Conclusion

I am left with the realization that we are living in the end stages of our culture. Furthermore, anyone with any political or cultural power has every incentive to keep things as they are, or even to accelerate the decline.

We have passed our zenith, and this is the twilight. What comes next - total collapse? Disintegration followed by some kind of resurgence? Further decline? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I will continue on, living in my country that has become alien to me. I will live as a stranger in a strange land. My memories sustain me.