Tempering your expectations and living more frugally would be reasonable-- if Americans had not traded all semblance of culture, religion, family, and most of their free time for the promise of a consumerist utopia.

If we are forced to produce labor and products with first-world discipline, live our social lives in a post-modernist degeneracy, and now can't even enjoy first world luxuries, what is the point? We sold the dignity and freedom of the old world for wealth, and now the globalists tell us the wealth isn't forthcoming. Why would we still uphold the system? Why should we be decent? We were robbed. The social contract is broken. Why tolerate the system at all? Why not just check out, collect welfare, play Vidya all day and abuse the system as much as possible?

Of course that's what more and more young people are doing, and detached morons like this author wring their hands and wonder why.