I can see why many other Gen Xers find your article inspiring. As a person who is not a GenX, it is painfully obvious that it was written by a Gen Xer with all of the stereotypical blind spots of your generation about the realities facing the generations that came after you. Millenials didn't buck the system because they were inspired. Gen Z isn't inventing a new system because they are innovative and have been freed of the chains of employment oppression. Nor are Gen Z whiny cry babies. Boomers inherited the greatest system of lower and middle class upward mobility ever built. They and elder Gen X climbed those ladders with ease - cheap education, good paying jobs, pension plans, cheap and abundant housing that accumulated insane amounts of personal wealth, wages that kept pace with inflation, employer fully paid health benefits, employment protections through unions, politicians who still needed to answer to constituents because of limits on campaign contributions, and I could continue. As the Boomers climbed those ladders of money and power, they dismantled those ladders behind them. Breaking every single upward mobility system in existence. This took time, so much of Gen X still benefited from those systems. By the time the oldest Millenials reached adulthood just months before 9/11, all of those systems were gone, though most of us, being told our whole childhood outdated lies about how the world worked, didn't know this yet and floundered for over a decade figuring it out the hard way. If we were lucky, we figured out how to think outside the box and survived but a record few managed to be more successful than our parents. We raised Gen Z on the truth. The system is broken, the deck is stacked against you and the American Dream is dead. Dream a new dream, but know the road will be hard and no one will care.