I'm an old fart. My little sister is having her 20-year high school reunion this year. When I was young:

- I could get a job in high school. I had several. For that matter, I violated child labor laws. I started working after school at a toy store in 3rd grade (my parents were cool with it and the toy store owner was crazy). I say this not to illustrate my pluck but to illustrate that I wasn't competing with college-educated 20-somethings for summer and after-school employment. Fast food restaurants were universally staffed by high school students. Now? Now they're staffed by the underclass.

- I could work during college. I did a lot of that, too. It paid my way. That's done a lot less these days. I made not great money mixing bands in clubs; now all those jobs (and there are a third of them, due to the decline of live music) are held by college interns whose parents can blow $80k on a worthless degree from the Art Institute. Repeat for every semi-skilled profession.

- I could get a leg up easily. There was no social media so there were no HR professionals friending me on Facebook as a condition of my employment. Resumes were mailed, or attached to email. Because the marketplace hadn't been made efficient to the point of cruel, connections still mattered.

When I started in the workplace, the 'boomers were 15 years from retirement. The Silent Generation? They had such a golden parachute they couldn't wait to get out the door. So the 'boomers moved up and all the jobs they were leaving? Those were totally available to my cohort.

I remember visiting a jobsite with my boss and a coworker in July 2000 or so. The market was discussed. My boss mentioned that her retirement fund had lost over a hundred thousand dollars in three months.

And sure - it had likely gained a hundred thousand in the year before that but the loss was real. That was her retirement pushed out. Meanwhile I had several friends that were '99ers - the dot-com proletariat that came to Silicon Valley just in time to see the flayed carcass of the dot com bubble. They've never recovered, either - they had a year, eighteen months maybe of glorious six figure incomes and they've been chasing the high ever since.

Even then, with an engineering degree I discovered that the marginal utility on my employment was much higher than most of my friends. The fact that I made double to triple what they did was certainly a lever I could push on to raise better dates.

This shit's real and it's not going to get better any time soon. But sure. Let's blame video games.