When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet.

But why?

I posit that Boomers and Gen X had such an easy go of it, they assumed we would, too. Born to an economy that was thriving, they had to know relatively little themselves because there was always someone else who could do it. In short, that translates, over time, to less value placed on teaching the next generation to thrive and looking at things like school milages as "my tax dollars not benefiting me directly."

These previous generations also operate under the illusion that they somehow had it harder than we do now. This is perpetuated by the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" attitude that most of them seem to have adopted while having to ask for help operating a smart fridge or iPhone. It's really a failure of self-awareness, if we remove all the fictional swagger they've built their lives around, and it has left us a nation that is crumbling under its own ignorance and stupidity.

Now people my age (late 30's - early 40's) are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to figure out how we can afford to fix the problem so our children can do better than us, and we are utterly failing to find a solution because we are operating in a system that was designed to cater only to the selfishness of our parents and grandparents.