I think where a lot of the millenial bitterness comes from is that we were all banned from biking more than a half mile from the house, but everyone thought the covenant was that we'd always be protected.

The moral panics of the '80s were AIDS, Dungeons & Dragons, drugs and rock music. The moral panic of the '90s was

No matter where you were, no matter what you were doing, someone nefarious (and as you were a mature adult, and as there was a whole generation younger than you, they definitely listened to Pearl Jam ifyouknowwhatImean) was going to Steal.Your.Child. This is important because it reflects an inversion: in the '80s, children had to be kept on the straight and narrow lest they fall afoul of temptation. In the '90s, children had to be wrapped in bubble wrap and held in isolation against errant strikes of lightning. There's an agency in upbringing that has been there throughout time: up until the '90s, the concern has been "what will the kids get up to." Compare and contrast 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s horror/exploitation films with the '90s. Serial killers used to come after you if you transgressed. "I know what you did last summer" worked in the '90s (the book was written in the '70s) because it's about kids just living their lives who end up being stalked and murdered. Final Destination? Frickin' causality itself is the villain.

But outside of movies and record stores, which were objectively better than what we have today (and I'll fuckin' go to the mat on both accounts, though maybe not with you!),

Movies are vastly worse. Record stores have the advantage of curation, but I never experienced a record store that had any gift of curation. I include the record store run by a friend of mine that sold exclusively industrial music - because he sold exclusively industrial music, he sold all industrial music and lots of it is terrible.

The late 90s were when first tier state schools started really preferring students with high test scores and high GPAs (though nothing like today's rat race), and everyone was focused on getting to the good school rather than what comes next.

It's worse than that - the late '90s were when things shifted from "you should go to college" to "of course you're going to college" and the prices matched. Millennials took the brunt of that, too - there are far too many people with degrees, so degrees get deprecated, and there's no limit to how much you can owe. But again, no generation has had as much parental involvement in their college as millennials. The agency is notably absent. Well, scratch that. We see a lot of GenZ who are so mollycoddled by their GenX parents that they can't so much as go out and interview for a job without Mommy coming, too. But there are also a lot more GenZ who took one look at the college landscape and said "If my choices are working retail with no debt or working retail with $40k of debt, I'll skip the debt, thanks."

And this is why I hate Strauss & Howe - it fucking makes sense. I'm eight years older than you but I was walking to school in 2nd grade, coming home to an empty house and half the time making my own dinner. My wife is three months younger than me but her parents are 'boomers and she still talks about that amazing time in 3rd grade when she walked all the way to school and back. Now granted - I grew up in legit don't-tell-the-social-worker neglect and she didn't. But there was a very real cusp between the feral and non-feral children in my cohort and it was, to a man, how young are your parents.

I think that the one thing that is inarguably horrible about being a kid these days (and again, I'm not too adjacent, just trying to synthesize what I see around me) is social media.

I think social media will die with the boomers. I think it was created by millennials for them and their parents and I think GenZ doesn't give a shit. Our experience with GenZ is they don't fucking care, Facebook has always been a trap, don't hustle for clout hustle for money, an online presence is a massive net-negative and if you're not being remunerated don't bother.

My kid is ten. She has a friend that desperately wants a youtube channel. She and my daughter and two of their other friends endlessly rehearse online skits that shall never be online, constantly revising, constantly discussing, with no real intent to ever actually do anything with it. I have a number of friends whose children are approaching college, in college or freshly out of college and none of them give the first fuck about social media. My experience with community college is the younger you are, the less you engage with social media of any kind. There was a frontier where it was beneficial but that frontier was full of McDonald's and whorehouses by the time GenZ made it there and they have better shit to do.