It's not just a matter of a "different" world or a different way of life.
There are better ways of living and worse ways too.
That is the whole point of life: to live it fully, to better oneself, to make a better life for family and others around you, to improve your lot in life in a Godly fashion if such is your choosing, or simply in a qualitative manner, if that is your wish.
Your comparison of the 50s generation and their grandparents to modern youth does not hold up. My parents' ancestors might not have thought my parents' life was necessarily a spiritual improvement upon the old ways, but they most certainly would have recognized my parents' hard work, their achievements, their strivings for a better way.
The young people and their "virtual world," as you describe, can in no way be seen as an improvement upon the hopeful, ambitious, vigorous, purposeful outlook of my parents (and of me too, for that matter).
A life of tiny spaces, tiny devices, "part-time jobs, high tech socialism, and minimal materialism" is a path of reductionism in every sense: physical, spiritual, intellectual, material.
They own little or nothing, they are building on nothing (except some vague sense of self and of "experience"), they exercise nothing in the way of discrimination or judgement except a default bias against "judgement" itself.
They are adrift, purposely purposeless, content in the absence of challenges, and very, very vulnerable.
They are a half-step from slavery.
Looks like the progressive plan is on track...
Very well said.
>>They are a half-step from slavery.
We’re all a half-step from slavery, my friend. They are just better adapted to it.
As for living your life fully: a rural person says that an urban person is living in a rat maze, scrambling for cheese. An urban person says that the rural person is wasting their life digging in the dirt for subsistence. Both look at the suburban person with disdain, and the suburban person looks back at them with the same feelings. Living a full life is what you want it to be and not what society tells you it is and certainly not what someone who chose a different path says it is.
The millenials didn’t create this world they find themselves in. They didn’t create anything and that is their biggest flaw. But, they did adapt to it fairly well.
The only real problem is that they don’t know how to make the wheels turn in this technological society. They can build a web site, but they can’t make a turbine spin to generate the electricity. My generation (the late boomers and post-boomers) are the ones keeping the lights on, and we can’t find anyone with the intelligence and the desire to replace us. They all want to be our boss, but none of them are willing to sweat or get dirty. When a 65 year old co-worker retires, we have to replace him with a 45 year old because no one younger has the skill set.
So, when my generation dies, the lights will go out and the water will stop flowing, but I’ll be dead and then its their problem.