Oh, well, have fun feeling superior, I suppose; your perspective is not going to help you understand why people who have not been quite so fortunate as you have tend to make the kinds of decisions that we do.
When you are young, saving anything, even $50-100 monthly ends up being significant for retirement. If you can get employer matching, it's even better.
Then, over a 40+ year career, you are wanting me to believe/accept that it isn't the individual's fault they are still living paycheck to paycheck and cannot save for retirement? Like I said, you have to try to not save at that point in your career. I don't know of a single career that earns a paycheck but doesn't offer retirement plans... I know lots of jobs that don't, but not careers. People working jobs for 40+ years are indeed messing up...
Saving for retirement is perhaps the easiest financial thing you will ever do. It requires filing out a form for your employer, and then you can forget about it if you want.
Instead, some people want to act helpless and then expect others to carry them in retirement. Seems fair...
It’s okay to admit that while you also had it hard, younger people have it much, much harder. This shouldn’t be surprising. Home ownership is completely off the table if all that can be spared is $1200/yr.
Do you even look at the price tag of bananas when you buy them? Consider perhaps that the date of your birth has more impact than your rugged sacrifice and work ethic. I see plenty of both of those things in my zoomer friends and it doesn’t make rent more affordable.
I’ll add for transparency that I make a very comfortable six figure salary at an old, stable software company you’ve likely heard of. I stay in my amenity-less apartment because the rent is low enough to keep the shaky dream of home ownership alive. I even have pretty generous RSUs. I am extremely lucky. Even still, without ~equal partnership and shared ownership with someone roughly as wealthy as me, I couldn’t afford to own a home in the neighbourhood I grew up in. I’m 29 years old and have been making this much for three years. There aren’t many jobs that pay better than this.
Spare me your financial advice and think of people who make less than a third of what I make who grew up next to me. Some of them work good union blue collar jobs that your parents would have respected. Everything has outpaced wage growth. Everything.
This fictitious person who can't scrape together $100 a month for retirement but has worked for 5, 10, 20+ years is a complete myth, or a total failure on a personal level.