You just nailed why "nobody wants to work anymore".
I grew up in the 80s and Gen X people like me mostly remember asking our Boomer parents for money and they would maybe give us $20 or tell us to get a job. Meanwhile many of them (not mine) were making bank. We grew up with the understanding that there would simply be no money for us other than what we earned ourselves. The minimum wage would never increase, working people's taxes would never decrease, rich people's taxes would never increase, social security would be gone by the time we retire, etc etc etc. It never made sense to me how the hippie generation that learned so much about consciousness and the human condition managed to unlearn all of that and revert to a greed-is-good gilded age philosophy of trickle-down economics.
So I've come to equate deciding for others with sin. Because the ultimate sin is to look out for oneself and deny the agency of another under whatever mental construct floats your boat. That's what stuff like the golden rule and 10 commandments are about.
We're seeing this today with center-right populist politics where its proponents call grown adults snowflakes for calling out exploitation. And even the center-left silently supports neoliberal colonialism if it supports its narrative. This is why I could never vote for a republican that thinks he/she knows better than me while undercutting me, or a democrat who claims to act in my interests while gentrifying my community to raise my rent for example.
The elders currently in charge of government think they have some wisdom that comes with age, but they can't hear us when we tell them that there are no adults in the room. Because the world is literally burning while they obsess themselves with materialistic pursuits that will materially diminish the quality of life for us and future generations.
Meanwhile Millenials and Gen Z seem to be rejecting this patriarchy. And Gen X largely wants no part of withholding resources from others "for their own good". I see two possible futures around 2030: a head-in-the-sand focus on the comfort of the family like in the early 2000s and 1990 where actual world peace is put out of sight and mind, or a silent revolution where the old guard retires and young people pay those inherited resources forward to automate the drudgery that consumes our waking lives so that we can move into the New Age.
The odds say that the former future is most likely based on history, but I suspect that the incalculable rage that young people feel towards the rich and powerful may alchemize into a level of healing love that the world hasn't seen yet. In other words if you have children, they will self-actualize in the ways which you were denied, and that wind-in-our-sails shift from conservatism towards investment in the future will play out across the population at large and deliver rapid spiritual evolution and innovation like we saw during the pandemic. So we should probably maintain vigilance in the face of one last sabotage as the powers that be attempt to cement minority rule by the elites before they pass.