Given things like Viet Nam, the Cold War/Iron Curtain, the inflation of the late 80's, a couple of Oil Crises, brushfire wars, ... it's safe to say that people

Given things like Viet Nam, the Cold War/Iron Curtain, the inflation of the late 80's, a couple of Oil Crises, brushfire wars, ... it's safe to say that people starting out then had various distractions that kept them from doing their best. Before the boomers, they had wars and the Depression, making everything I just mentioned small potatoes. I went to uni in the mid-70's and I've sat thinking about it while having coffee. Science major, 36 courses with lots of math and labs, so they're probably comparable to today. I had computers to play with, but they were big, honkin' things I had to walk a few blocks to get to. There was a good party scene with booze, soft and hard drugs if you knew where to look. Racial tensions were present in various cities. Music was great, both radio and concerts. The only real difference was that there was no 24/7, on-line presence. We had phones, but to interact with others on campus it involved getting together somewhere - smallish groups no matter how you did it. The phone was used to deal with one's parents or a remote social relationship but even those could be dealt with via snail mail. But nothing ate huge blocks of non-academic time as even gaming and D&D required a clump of people to do anything with it. This suggests that yeah, the current and preceding generation have it worse than those before them due to the network, not due to economic or social activities. Campus life might be a little less safe than previously, but the urban campuses in the Northeast in the 70's were not peaceful islands of tranquility. The effects of the network and social media are that significant, and as I type this, I can see the staggeringly enhanced communication opportunities and time sinks being the significant difference between "now" and "then". Given that the VC culture has funded much of the network and all of social media, it might be hard to look in the mirror at times? The joke was that the best and brightest of these generations aren't solving great problems - they're selling ads and collecting people's data. Hell, a large chunk of the young protested such things in the late 60's! Is this the best we all can do? Oh, and statistically pretty much everybody had to write the "Is Hamlet Mad?" or "Was Hitler inevitable?" papers at least once back then. Perhaps that continued to today, but the AI tools should make such things way easier. That's something that you don't have to sweat anymore :-).