Well, when you are a 50-year old DINK with no house payments due to a family fluke two generations ago, the salary goes to things other than diapers and after school sports and minivans and providing calories to voracious growing humans and saving for college and/or retirement and all that. The people your age that are doing alright financially are not story-worthy and don't fit the model the media is selling. So you don't hear about them much, except when someone complains about "gentrification", and then realizes it's caused largely by millenials making Amazon/Google/etc money, and paying exorbitant amounts for things, because they can. It ain't 35-year old parents of 2 that are paying $2500/mo for a 500-square foot one-bedroom apartment/condo in that new LEED-certified building that replaced that classic old Seattle craftsman bungalow...