“I wonder how well people would manage if they had to deal with the conditions that our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had to deal with.”
You’ll get to find out; these young people are going to have a much lower standard of living than their parents (and they know it). I can’t believe how many young people I know (25 to 35 years old) have no car, either live at home or with multiple roommates, have no steady full-time work with benefits, etc.. It is disturbing, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel; with globalization, any job worth more than $30K annually has forces at work scrambling to either send it overseas or to import foreigners to do it for less.
Our young people are selfish (they were raised that way) and ill-informed (they were “educated in a horrible school system); they are also angry. They should be.
One of the things that helped us was our faith and a sense of right an wrong. And charity.