Now multiply this by everyone, and you have what our society has become: moribund.
There is nothing on the horizon that's going to change this. It doesn't matter who we elect next, no matter how many elections pass. The west is over the hill and on the way out.
Well, there IS something on the horizon: war. Civil war, world war, doesn't matter. But long, slow, decline, war, or some other catastrophe are the only things that are likely to happen. There's no amount of plausible policy change that's going to fix this, because it didn't happen in the first place due to policy change. It happened due to an accidental confluence of circumstances after a world war.