[Melk]

It sounds a lot like you are looking at your own life by living it and looking at your that of your parent's from an overview of their past. Ask them what they were doing and how they felt at your age at the start of their career and trying to raise a family and I'll bet they had the same anxieties that you do on a day to day basis. I don't like this habit online discussions have of blaming Baby Boomers for "everything" because they usually aren't here to give their side of the story.

[buzzybee]

I know what my parents say about the starts of their careers.

Dad: abject strong-silence, refuses to reminisce because it makes him look less competent, I hear about all the odd jobs he tried before programming from Mom

Mom: playing music is a bad business and sheet music is a bad business and teaching is a bad business and everyone was hostile about everything I tried and I never succeeded - votes Trump

I say anything about what things are like for me and they're stunned, they can't relate. Mom makes a good effort to relate, but it mostly turns into her career story each time.

I don't blame the generation, really, though. I blame whatever sociocultural fallout it is that created such scared, damaged people.

[fuzzfactor]

After Nixon was done some boomers were more damaged than scared, others the reverse.

Lots were scared and damaged by the immediate situation, but others had also traditionally inherited both feelings which were passed down by their grandparents to their parents to them over the 70 years leading up to Nixon.

Uncautious boomers who were caught by surprise by the finality of the 1970's were the most unprepared for increasing opportunities to no longer be generally available to themselves or future generations.

There was widespread superstition that this can't really be happening in the USA and that is an element of the boomer groupthink that still colors their understanding of more recent generations.

For boomers whose parents had the opportunity and successfully used it to achieve financial prosperity from scratch without the benefit of any family resources beforehand, it was very common for their grandparents to still be existing on the same type of survival rations that got them through the Great Depression, even while the boomers themselves were growing up in a priveleged community.

Yes, that's the last generation to be able to arrive that much better off than their grandparents, but it's not their fault.