The Hollow Men is from 1925

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/tseliot/1076

A link to a Reddit thread? What?

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think that it can be evaluated through subjective experience. Most men have a very optimistic and idealized view of the world when they're young and become more and more cynic and pessimistic with time; people age, their neurobiology change, their space of possibility is shrinking.

Also, does it speak about US or the world at large? Workers in US have had an advantage over the rest of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, and now, with this advantage going away, they inevitably feel that they're economic prospects are becoming worse; but from a purely utilitarian perspective, for every worker in US who no longer can afford a middleclass lifestyle from a blue collar jobs there are several workers raising from poverty somewhere in Asia.