Yes and no. A lot of younger people today are incapable of making strong or hard life choices. Even something as simple as deciding to go to a trade school ins

Yes and no. A lot of younger people today are incapable of making strong or hard life choices. Even something as simple as deciding to go to a trade school instead of risk a liberal arts degree. Yet these folks know going into it what sorts of options they have in terms of majors, and they have to know they're staring down the barrel of questionable employment if they pursue a less lucrative education. Yet somehow they feel they don't need to make sacrifices. The same thing goes when it comes to budgeting. Netflix? Smart phones? Starbucks? These are part of the economic floor for a lot of people of recent generations. But in many ways they are luxuries. If you are having trouble making ends meet then you need to cut some of those things. You can get buy without a smartphone, although even just going with the cheapest option (low cost smartphone w/ a prepaid plan) saves a crapton of money compared to the average. I think a lot of people have no clue how much people of previous generations went without common conveniences on a routine basis just to keep the bills paid. Boomers weren't buying starbucks every morning and dining out every day, they were packing sack lunches and drinking coffee made from a can. That said, there are still some really shitty things that Gen Y and the millenials have to deal with that boomers didn't. Jobs are harder to get, they don't pay as well, and the cost of living is higher. These days even entry level jobs require a ton of leg work and paper work to fill, and they usually have restrictive hours and almost invariably crappy pay. Median home prices vs. median household income has been increasing considerably since the 1970s. Considering that owning a home has typically been a multi-decadal achievement for a lot of folks that increasing ratio ends up translating directly into a great many folks denied home ownership, and the many financial benefits that come with it. And then you look at the college situation and wonder how anyone today manages. Increasingly college education is a prerequisite for many jobs, even jobs that do not require anything other than basic literacy skills. Compared to an era when high school dropouts could easily find work and where mere high school graduates could commonly find white collar jobs as long as they had the skills, today is a much different playing field. Add to that the fact that acquiring a useful college credential usually ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. All of that makes for a very tight squeeze for many folks entering the work force today. Yeah, a lot of people today make poor choices and they whine, but make no mistake, it's a legitimately tough situation they are in.