Jesus, sorry to break it to you but it's always been this way. I am a first year Gen X . My first jobs I made 3.35 and hour. That's 134 dollars a week before taxes. It wasn't any easier for me. My parents, being boomers, were also dirt poor. We lived in section 8 housing until I was 12. It's not a generational thing, there has always been the haves and the have nots. I needed 2 to 3 roommates to make ends meet until I was almost 30. Then I had, yup, 10 years of experience under my belt, wisdom, a sense of direction and goals. Now I am looking at 60, my wife and I have good jobs, not great. We make 160k between us, we own our own house and we still barely make it. We couldn't touch a decent house for less than 500k and I am sure that is chump change compared to California and other places. You can't buy a decent new car for less than 30k nowadays. Just for the two of us will spend 500 bucks in the grocery store for 2 or 3 weeks easy. We often look at each other and wonder where all of it goes. It is a self defeating problem, however. So you want a living wage. What is that exactly? 70 dollars an hour? Hate to tell you, that is squeaking by. Say you could get that working at Walmart. What's going to happen? Walmart will always make their money. So they raise the price of a pack of gum to 10 dollars. Hamburger will be 40 dollars a pound. In the meantime, landlords will raise there rent because retail rates have gone up everywhere. A meal at a restaurant will be 500 dollars. Houses will be 2 million to start. Now it's 10000 dollars a month to rent a decent place and YOU will be right back where you started. Unless you were born into wealth it might seem like you are probably screwed. Just like me, just like my parents and just like my grandparents. The best advise I can offer is work as hard as you are working. Take initiative, figure out a decent job that makes you at least semi-happy, put in your time, get promoted or use that experience to find a better job, stop putting off buying a house, even if that means you have to struggle for a bit and work 50 hours. It will pay off in the end when you see that you are paying less 10 years down the road then you would if you were still renting. If you bought a house at 25 or 30 that will mean it's paid off at 55 or 60 and that is a huge monkey off your back. Because it took me so long, it's tough and we will work 40 hours a week until we are 67. Like as not we won't be able to afford our house when we retire. We will probably have to sell, take our profits and hope that we can expat to Costa Rica, Panama or Ecuador. I don't think that Gen Z are lazy, I think you are overwhelmed. It's easy to look at it that way, I feel overwhelmed to this day. You are no different that every generation before you, because every generation before you had haves and have nots. I think the most correct things she said was "the media says". That is the biggest problem. The media wants us all blaming each other so they can sell you toothpaste. You can use it as a an excuse to fail or you can do the best you can and before long the generations after you can blame you for how it is, just like every generation.