Something I did at 17 and they do at 37.
Obviously I was not coddled. No participation trophies. You lost? WORK HARDER and next time it will not be YOU.
It had gotten to the point that what we achieved “back in the day” isn’t really comparable to a lot of what young people deal with today. The adjusted cost of housing is much higher today. The cost of medical care. The cost of gas. The cost of higher education has gone up astronomically — and yes, higher education is a scam to some extent, but you aren’t going to be a doctor or engineer without higher ed. Insurance requirements and the cost of insurance. Cars today are more expensive and much harder to work on yourself. Young people are buried under a monstrous cost of living, it’s much harder to scrape by like we used to.
I know some very successful millennials. But not everyone has the chops to be an engineer or a doctor. The Trades are hard to crack into these days too, if you aren’t thinking ahead when you’re 16. I saw a comment somewhere here that millennials are too stupid to earn a viable living. The truth is, the cost of living has gone up and good livable jobs have shrunk. It didn’t used to be that people who weren’t clever and handy and weren’t higher than average intelligence faced the prospect of never being successful no matter how hard they worked. But today, that is more and more the case. Hence, people aren’t able to get ahead until much later. As long as they’re working we shouldn’t be tossing snide comments down on them.
Same here, and I’m a woman. But it was a lot easier to do then. I’m aghast at what things cost today in comparison, and the added digital equipment deemed necessary. When it comes to products and services, massive amounts if lawsuits and swindles have driven every price up or quality down, as have globalization, the education bubble, the healthcare scam, the extortionate support of indigents and immigrants, and the death of the mom’n’pop main street due to over-regulation, chain stores and big box discounters. Shopping used to be a pleasure. Now you have to be significantly richer in relation to basic necessities to enjoy the same sense of middle-class affordability from average household income. Trump hammered this point in his 2016 campaign—one of the many reasons I voted for him. But he seems also to be a fan of big government spending.