I feel that people that graduated high school in 2020 had the worst experience (at least in the US) of any cohort in at least 50 years. They didn't get to experience really the end of high school, and those that started college in the fall didn't really get to experience the beginning of college, when many people make lifelong friends. Now they're graduating in 2024, where the vibe on many campuses is one of division, suspicion and despair over the Israel/Gaza war, and they're likely to see greatly diminished economic prospects (especially compared to anyone who graduated college in tech from say 2010 to 2021). Not to mention the general "vibe in the air" is one of pessimism in the US.

I have a ton of empathy for these people, and it makes me count my lucky stars for being a Gen Xer. Honestly, I feel like Gen X is the luckiest of all the generations. People generally don't blame us for f'ing everything up, we had the luck of growing up before the Internet and smartphones where we still got to just play and have relatively unstructured "kid lives", many of us graduated into the booming, optimistic 90s. Many of us got to buy houses before they became unobtainably expensive. Sure, we had the epidemic of parental divorce, and if anything that hope of the 90s has, at least for me, turned to jadedness in many areas, but I just feel so lucky to have been born when I was.