In one of his last works H. G. Wells wrote this:

” The writer sees the world as a jaded world devoid of recuperative power… The old men behave for the most part meanly and disgustingly, and the young are spasmodic, foolish and all too easily misled. Man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favour of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. Only a small, highly adaptable minority of the species can possibly survive”:

Mind at the End of its Tether (1945)