We were also the first generation to realize we didn’t need to have kids. I’m the proud father of zero people because by the time I could have had one, I already was aware that childrearing was expected simply so that we’d grow some good soldiers and consumers. It doesn’t surprise me that people straddling the death of the social contract in the form of decades of stagnant wages weren’t the most thrilled to raise their kids to believe the system was still intact. That’s going to bleed into their educational expectations, and frankly, we love complaining about why what we got as kids is no longer available.

This said, we are a completely ignored generation precisely because we saw the death of the social contract: work hard, get ahead, buy a house. Instead, we got annual layoffs, no stability to even start adulthood as emulated by Boomer parents, and basically being erased because our experience wasn’t useful to politicians or advertisers – our concerns were aggressively ignored in favour of the Carl Icahn school of American society to distract from the systemic destruction. So when you critique what my generation is like as parents, consider the conditions we were raised under.

There’s a reason I decided the correct decision was to become a homeless hippie.

Millennials and past never expected any sort of social contract because it was shredded during our formative years. I suspect a large part of the reason Boomers refuse to give up power is handing it off to Gen X would result in significant structural reforms that would be bad for billionaires. If they can hold off until Millennials, then we can safely arrive at “there was never any social contract. Bootstraps!”

Handing power to the ones who saw the collapse unfold in real time is anathema to the military-industrial complex, as well as corporations that make more money in a minute than I have in my entire lifetime.