You keep mentioning the 45 yo thing. Let me tell you I am over 45 a bit over weight but I put my experience skill set work ethic up against 80-90 percent of those 20-25 years younger than me. I also grew up with no silver spoon ate beans 4 days or better out of the week, wore hand me downs, learn to sew, wash iron, cook plant and work a garden, and take care of my younger siblings. It was cold in our house in the winter and we shared one window fan in the summer. I camp, hiked fished, was a boy scout and learn to shoot. I have had a job of one kind or another since I was 15. I have work in a foundry, a steel fabricator, I’ve been a janitor, night clean-up in a porcelain fixture factory, dug up trees at a nursery, delivered furniture, managed millions of dollars of equipment and materials on large construction projects (both petrochemical and telecom) self taught carpenter and cabinet maker. I can read, write and do math in my head and don’t need a cash register to be able to make change. Other than HVAC there is not anything I hire done to my house. I’ve manage to accumulate a good deal of prepper knowledge over the last few years. And I do my best to live by two codes the Ten Commandments and James Owen’s Cowboy Code. How many people under 25 do you know that can best that?
And there are a lot of under 45 more than 25# overweight.
We live in a small rural town and are not nearly as unsheltered about farming and wildlife as I'd like. Nevertheless, although we're fairly new at the rural thing, we're LIGHT YEARS ahead of your average city kid.
My oldest daughter just graduated from college and was constantly amazed and appalled at the total lack of experience or knowledge about even basic wildlife and farming that most of her city born and bred college peers displayed.
College kids and younger today are so pampered and spoiled, that they'll probably be among the first to go.
The older folks will die off from health issues long before they'd die off from the inability to manage without having everything handed to them on a silver platter.
The entitlement generation, however, is a different matter. They have no survival skills of any kind. Try to find a one that knows how to sew, garden, can, heat with wood, hang out laundry on the line, etc. Take away their modern conveniences, and they're lost.
They're the idiots who go out somewhere on a 15 degree day in the middle of winter and just hop in the car without taking a coat, figuring that they don't need one since they'll be going from a warm house to a warm car, to another warm place, not even considering what might happen if the car broke down.
They have no idea how to even deal with the elements. Exposure will claim a lot of them.