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This article looks at narratives of economic decline among two generations of mineworkers in Katanga province (DRC): the pensioners of the industrial mining giant, Gécamines, and creuseurs, young men working as diggers. The author analyzes the “structures of feeling” informing the lives of individuals in these two generations of mineworkers as each deals with the material and social effects of industrial decline and the subsequent liberalization of the mining sector in Congo. He shows that the shared thoughts and sentiments of contemporary decline reflect how individuals in each generation experience their social emplacement and “entanglement in time” (Achille Mbembe). Based on his informants’ narratives of marginalization, which come in the wake of the liberalization of mining sector, the author argues that social decline in Congo confounds the strict scholarly framings of periodicity, which foreground rupture—rather than continuity—between the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras.