Surely it's a combination of both when you graduate and how you grow up? My problem with your line of reasoning is that I believe you're mistakenly generalizing in this important respect:
You're lumping the entirety of "generation X" into a shared-cultural-experience group, when someone who was born in 1975 probably had quite a lot more opportunities entering the job market than someone born in 1965 or 1985.
I mean what are we even saying here? In general people had better childhoods in the 90s than they did in the 70s and early 80s? Ok, but we're talking about variations on the edges of various largely immobile population blocks. Your personal experience might have been difficult, but how do you know that mine wasn't just as difficult or worse? How are you so sure that I'm not already as humble as you are? This whole generation generalization strikes me as something like "Ohio State can't win the national championship because the SEC is faster".
You're lumping the entirety of "generation X" into a shared-cultural-experience group, when someone who was born in 1975 probably had quite a lot more opportunities entering the job market than someone born in 1965 or 1985.
I mean what are we even saying here? In general people had better childhoods in the 90s than they did in the 70s and early 80s? Ok, but we're talking about variations on the edges of various largely immobile population blocks. Your personal experience might have been difficult, but how do you know that mine wasn't just as difficult or worse? How are you so sure that I'm not already as humble as you are? This whole generation generalization strikes me as something like "Ohio State can't win the national championship because the SEC is faster".