This could have just as easily been written by a Gen Xer or a Late Boomer. The problem is that people who are 25 now are comparing their economic fortune not to those of people born 10 years earlier, but to those of people born 30 to 50 years earlier, who entered the working world in the Mad Men era.

If you were late Silent or early Boomer (b. 1930 to 1950) you faced an extraordinarily easy career game. Even in advertising, the era's analogue of banking, people left work at 6:00. Unlike those who are young now, you didn't have to bust your ass through college and internships. People dropping acid at Woodstock in '69 could walk into executive-track corporate jobs in '70 and be VPs by '72. They had it really fucking easy. Today you can't get a decent entry-level job with a 3.4 GPA and no internship.

The sunny era, however, didn't end in 2008 or 2001, but much earlier. If you were leaving college in the mid-1970s stagflation era, you'd missed it. There were small, blippy, "booms" localized to a few industries (banking, then oil/gas, then dot-coms, then oil/gas, then real estate, then banking) in the next three decades, but the general prosperity never came back.