It's all in the economics. Medicine has gotten better, equality has gotten better, technology has gotten way better.
But the core of the average American's existence has gotten worse. The core is economic - affordability of housing, affordability of raising children, affordability of health care and education - all of which are considerably worse today than they were decades ago.
The young of today are pissed because the odds are ludicrously stacked against them when it comes to the basics.
Sure, smartphones are $100 in a prepaid box and can get you any fact in the world at the touch of your fingertips. That's a pretty shitty replacement for, say, owning your own home, or being able to afford to send your kids to college. Hell, many of the young today can't even find stable employment, much less good enough employment to allow them to pursue future goals. Entire classes of labor are disappearing with nothing to take their place.
So yeah, we've landed robots are Mars, we know a lot more about most diseases, and we have technology that would seem like utter magic to people in the 50s. But all of that is very cold comfort to today's youth, who would give up all of that if it meant a decent income and a real shot at owning their own future.
> "If it's harder to attain these things, how are more people doing it?"
By going further and further into debt.
How quickly do we forget? The crisis of 2008 wiped out millions of people who were mortgaged up to their eyeballs just so they can own a home. Real wages have been stagnant for years (and regressing in many parts of the country) while home prices continue rising. People are leveraging themselves to extreme (and unwise) levels just to afford the same house their parents comfortably bought with a single middle-class income.
The average student's debt load at graduation has also increased precipitously over the last few decades[1].
Economics and debt is at the root of these frustrations. The affordability of people's futures has decreased dramatically, a trend that was masked and softened by irresponsible borrowing and lending. But now that ride has come to a stop and we're faced with the reality that, for the majority of America, even people with upper-middle class incomes, the lifestyle of their middle-class parents seem downright unattainable..
> "People are leveraging themselves to extreme (and unwise) levels just to afford the same house their parents comfortably bought with a single middle-class income."
The "same" house? Hardly. People are leveraging themselves to afford bigger houses than their parents had. According to the National Association of Home Builders [0], average new house size was 1400 sq ft in 1970 and 2700 sq ft in 2009. You can find similar data from the census bureau's American Housing Survey [1]. For example, only 16% of total residences in 1970 had 2 or more bathrooms; in 2011 about 50% of residences had 2+ bathrooms.
I actually bought the same house as my parents [2]. Adjusting for inflation, it was essentially the same price in 2012 as it was in 1975 (within 2%, both as compared with CPI and comparing my dad's programmer salary at BigCo1 in 1975 to my wife's programmer salary at BigCo2 in 2009.)
[2] We recently found a fully wheelchair-accessible condo for my parents. We bought their house for market value; they used the proceeds to buy the condo. While the house has aged 4 decades since they bought it, it's got a brand new kitchen and a bunch of other recent upgrades, so on the whole it's pretty comparable.
But the core of the average American's existence has gotten worse. The core is economic - affordability of housing, affordability of raising children, affordability of health care and education - all of which are considerably worse today than they were decades ago.
The young of today are pissed because the odds are ludicrously stacked against them when it comes to the basics.
Sure, smartphones are $100 in a prepaid box and can get you any fact in the world at the touch of your fingertips. That's a pretty shitty replacement for, say, owning your own home, or being able to afford to send your kids to college. Hell, many of the young today can't even find stable employment, much less good enough employment to allow them to pursue future goals. Entire classes of labor are disappearing with nothing to take their place.
So yeah, we've landed robots are Mars, we know a lot more about most diseases, and we have technology that would seem like utter magic to people in the 50s. But all of that is very cold comfort to today's youth, who would give up all of that if it meant a decent income and a real shot at owning their own future.