They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Criticism
The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...
Why wouldn't people "monetize" things before?
Because you can only monetize people so much before they get testy about it.
They get tired of being advertised to. They start complaining about being nickeled and dimed for every single thing they used to get as a part of another purchase. They look at their wages staying flat while costs go up and up.
>A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
This is it. The American economy has been warped by the interests of older people who are more interested in keeping the wealth that they've accrued safe than in investing in ventures that are riskier but that provide a broader and more diverse base of opportunity. When you ask, "Why are so many young people unemployed or underemployed today?", it's because cash, which could have funded the investments that stupid young people would have made in risky small businesses that employ workers with idiosyncratic or less-than-expert skill sets, were instead placed in the hands of boomers who just bought more FAANG stock.
Suddenly, those huge conglomerates are the only ones with capital, so they bid up wages and costs to keep resources out of the hands of would-be competitors. This creates a cycle of "growth" (or, rather, when the organic growth subsides, government steps in with subsidies because they can't let the largest employers and economic engines in the country do poorly).
And here we are.