Beating on Young People

It's rare that I would post anything from Nerve.com, and the whole of this essay, "Coming Home: The Sexual Trials of the Boomerang Kid" is certainly NSFW, but I was struck by this graf:

The journalist-shrinks all seemed to think we boomerang kids favored our parents' homes over the bright and terrifying world of adult responsibility. They made us sound like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, whimpering, when anyone asked what we were doing, "I'm just sort of drifting... here ... in the pool." But, like most of my friends who lived at home, and like none of the boomerangers profiled in the blitz of articles, I worked full-time. I didn't pay rent, but I helped out with other bills. It infuriated me that this trend was attributed to some soft-headed psychological bullshit and not to pure economics.

On a related note, the author of last year's anti-youth book, Generation Me, is on the verge of getting some of her research published in an actual scientific journal. She argues based on personality testing that the Millennials are more narcississtic than previous generations. The interesting thing is that she, a PhD psychologist, published a whole popular book based on her pet theory without any previous academic recognition of its validity.

There's one piece of info on this subject that's always puzzled me when it's trotted out there:
Surveys show "current freshmen are much more interested in financial success and less in "a meaningful philosophy of life" than students were in the 1970s."

Current freshmen are under grossly expanded economic pressures compared to 30 years ago, including stagnating income, high student loan debt, and a greater necessity to work while in school. Maybe they're more interested in being well off because they're an entirely different class of people than the overwhelmingly white, male, middle class freshmen of the 1970s.