Shits fucked but younger zoomers still have completely fucked up expectations. Life is struggle, it always was.
I used to discuss things with my grandmother (Silent Gen) and greatgrandmother (G. I. Gen) a lot back in the day, the most recent talk was three years ago with the grandma.
Of course life's struggle, no denying that, but zoomers
don't have fucked up expectations. These expectations were the future my grandmas were hoping they're building on literal ruins after WW2. Both were saying that things globally indeed started to go slowly downhill around 80s-90s, slowly creeping to the boiling point that was ... first, they thought 9/11 is a peak event. Then 2008 global crisis. Things just kept going downhill and continue to do so. It's funny that both of them were concerned with boomers in power; these people are technically younger than them, but my grandmas weren't retarded and saw this as a major red flag. Gerontocracy built on individuals who, unlike them, didn't live through these major events but leech off of them all the time. And leech of off being raised in a world that offered hope after the worst human made disaster. And getting demented early it seems.
If people who lived through the most horrific war of the XX century and lived long enough to see how the world is changing say that shit's actually bad, then...
it's likely bad. Also,
What I'm hearing from hiring managers is that young people just starting out are asking for starting salaries on par with someone with 10-20 years of experience
That's fair, and there are lazy people (always were), however, on the other end we often see people who 100% qualify or even overqualify for a job but are denied it because they lack vague amount of years spent on "experience" in things they can prove by working like, a week tops.
We also live in times where everyone can learn various skills much quicker than in the recent boomer past. Of course people who overqualify but can't even get a small job will either give up or demand more than they "deserve". The system is also still built around old farts and their definitions of "being suitable for a job". I personally had to do up to a half of paperwork related garbage on my own, because these "qualified professionals" who work for 20-30 years in the same field couldn't even do bare minimum of what's required of them and stared at me like it's my problem that I expected them to be competent and didn't do stuff on my own. This too is demotivating and just adds up to disappointment in the whole system.
They don't experiment with the tools they have, they don't look around and see what other people are doing or just ask if they can tag along, they don't ask for things to do. They wait for work to be assigned to them.
That's... That's what employers at internship are supposed to do... To assign specific tasks... To directly train people... Dude. The only thing I'm hearing here is that teachers aren't the only mentors in the society who fail at their skill training jobs.
Also creativity is severely punished even in creative fields, and even moreso in "normie" jobs, especially these days. I'm not sure if it only happens now and became prevalent thanks to odd meme based on hatred towards Zoomers, or if it always existed towards young people, but being "creative" always backfires with "damn these retarded zoomies are at it again".
