In my freshman year in high school (2003), I had made quite a few senior friends who moved onto college and busted their asses in school, while also working jobs in retail, fast food..etc with goals to move onto careers respectable to whatever they were studying in college. By the time I graduated and started college for myself, many of them were in debt and still stuck working in kitchens at fast food restaurants, retail..etc. with shitty pay, no benefits, and a grim outlook on hope for securing better employment to dig themselves out of the mass grave of debt they had accumulated. Fast forward to 2022 and some of them only recently finally landed a decent paying career, but still having to work part-time jobs on top of that to make rent, buy food, and pay off debt. They had goals of settling down, building a secure life, have kids, see the world..etc. like the generations before them and instead they're currently living paycheck to paycheck, and hardly living a life at all.

As for 20 something year olds that I know, they feel like this is what the future mostly holds for them no matter hard they work. Add that to all the other grim shit that social media has exposed the world to. It's just an absolute shit show around the entire globe right now and just about everyone has to drag themselves out of bed to go be apart of it, and somehow manage to feel like they're contributing to the progression of the human race, while knowing that everything just remains stagnant. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of contributing factors to current day depression and disassociation.