Its also societal construction and built environment issues. There is a genuine lack of agency in the Millenial generation, and likely less again in the younger generations.
Take the built environment, its unfriendly to those with low resources, leading to isolation or dependency on those with resources, often boomer parents. The suburbs stretch on and on, all services public or private have been bundled together more and more, think super hospitals. Then they are placed further away because they now serve vast areas, there is also a fragility in these cost cutting ‘efficiencies’. If your one hospital is out of action what do you do? Even down to ever wider roads for ever larger cars, this impacts other activities an area could be engaging in.
Societal construction has undermined any civic engagement organisations that don’t have a pro-owner slant. Its telling that unions have been smashed, but chambers of commerce? They are basically unions for business owners. It’s also an unwillingness of boomers to let go of power in certain community groups. How many of these locak groups are almost exclusively full of very mature age people?
My last point i think ties into the above though. The X’ers, Millenials, and younger are getting hit progressively harder by the wage worker depression, while no risk financial speculation, and asset driven wealth inflation, line the beds of those with the means to participate. Usually the older, or children with inherited wealth. This means longer working hours for less relative income, a need to keep upgrading your ‘skillset’ to prove your value to HR, creating a poorer strata financially and in time. If the younger generations weren’t forced to change careers every six or so years to finally reach an ‘adult’ job, we would have time to participate more in our society.
I think the Millenial generation (mine) is going to be rather boring in the footnotes of history. (X’ers had a bit of punk and metal that keeps them spicy.) We won’t have the resources to be anything but rather conservative in our policies (classically so, not the radical republican-conservatism of the 80’s on).
On the bright side, in my country, Australia, the predicted shift to the ‘right’ as people get older seems to have broken. Which signals a rejection of the policies those parties stand for. Which are the policies causing the most acute problems for Millenials, and generations younger. So, maybe as the boomers fade, a generational solidarity will rise due to a union of desires, and our countrys will begin to feel less like generational trench warfare. That is my firm hope for the future of my time on this planet with you lot.