Society is failing these people. In some ways, they’re given the most advanced amenities humanity has ever been able to offer: fastest internet, the nicest cars, affordable global travel. In other areas, society is completely failing them. Connection, meaning, career prospects.
They’re spoiled in some ways, completely lost in others. It’s important we don’t ignore that.
Advanced amenities honestly is a very bad excuse for lack of empathy towards the younger generations.
I was born in 82 so I had the experience of life without mobile phones, cheap travel, Netflix, etc. Life wasn't harder in practice, because you don't miss things that aren't basic needs and that no one has or don't even exist. We had plenty of fun with what we had, we weren't thinking "oh, my life is so hard because I can't choose what I see on the TV or book a plane ticket from a tiny device in my pocket". If I went back in time and had all those things, I don't think my life would have been happier or easier.
(As an aside, the exception to this is medicine. For example, many cancers that could kill you easily back then have now a much better survival rate. That of course does make life much better for people who have such problems. But for those of us that are/were healthy, life wasn't worse back then).
You know what you do miss if you don't have it, and can make your life more miserable? Not being able to afford a home, raise a family, etc. Basic needs, and things that your parents and other people that you know had. That's a real problem. Not having Netflix or a smartphone when it wasn't even a thing is just not a real problem, it was a non-issue, and using it as an argument to minimize young people's complaints is dishonest.
I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people. Average person has no influence, not even a little bit, on any of those things. Meanwhile, a small subset of the people have all the influence and they mostly operate in their own self-interest.
I don’t mean to discharge responsibility. We are society, and the onus is on us to push for a better way of doing things.
> I can't wrap my head around "society failing people" - society is people.
Effectively, societies are Boomers and older generations. These form the majority of the population that is of voting age and they hold most of the financial (in stocks and real estate ownership) and executive power.
So yes, it can be said that society fails the younger generation.
I disagree, everyone operates in their own short term self-interest, leading to a massive scale prisoners dilemma and crab bucket mentality.
The vast majority on this planet believe in a perverse expected value calculation:
probability of becoming a billionaire * billion dollars > assets in fair society
where "assets in fair society" is higher than it currently is, maybe 2x or 3x, but it pales in comparison to the chance at 10000x and the optimism that distorts the "probability of becoming a billionaire" to be higher than it really is.
There is a perceived equilibrium between the remote possibility of undoing all the bad things that happened during the course of your life instantly and a more just society that merely gives you a little bit more money, but otherwise keeps most things the same, but with less stress and conflict.