[tdfx]

I agree with your premise that baby boomers have very tenuous grasp on how unique and lucky they were to grow up in the economic time period that they did. When the vast majority of the world's population is third world farmers and your country is at the forefront of industry and technological progress it's easy to coast and succeed.

However, that's clearly no longer the case and the average American needs to compete with a much broader pool of labor, increasing automation, and a growing middle class in more populous, emerging countries. I don't think millennials "deserve" what the baby boomers had; I just think the baby boomers didn't particularly deserve it either and it's becoming more and more obvious that the "normal" they experienced is an outlier era that will not return. Millennials need to learn to compete in this world and on average they are not well equipped to do so because they learned their perspective from a particularly (and unusually) privileged generation.

[rubicon33]

I like your perspective on the situation. It's both accurate, and far less pessimistic than mine. I'll do my best to adopt this way of thinking going forward.