Statistics Canada last week released a sobering but hardly surprising study of the current state of young people in Canada. Many cannot find affordable housing, forcing 43 per cent of 20 to 29-year-olds to live with their parent(s). Nearly 40 per cent believe they can’t afford to have a child over the next three years. Others are having trouble entering the labour market, a problem shared by most youth cohorts but which seems particularly challenging today because of technology. More broadly, Statcan notes young people’s mental health has been declining steadily since 2003, with feelings of loneliness rising and attachment to community declining.

The Statcan survey misleadingly frames young people as victims of circumstances beyond their control. Some problems certainly can be blamed on the pandemic and on bone-headed government policies that have created a housing affordability crisis in many parts of Canada. But blaming external circumstances ignores how every generation confronts daunting challenges. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 was the direct opposite of our own pandemic: it was particularly deadly for young people. The so-called Greatest Generation had to deal with both an epic economic depression and then the Second World War. Even the coddled boomers had to deal with the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, and at least two severe recessions (starting in 1981 and 1990) brought on by double-digit interest rates.

Each generation needs the tools to deal with the trials and tribulations life inevitably throws at everyone. Researchers have warned for years that our education system and how parents raise children have not adequately prepared today’s young adults. In his 2019 book The Second Mountain, New York Times columnist David Brooks observed how young people today are moving “from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history … into the least structured young adulthood in human history.”

In his 2022 book The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, Mark Bauerlein focused on how teenagers are “poorly trained for life” by a lack of adult oversight and self-immersion in tablets and smartphones instead of classic books. Failure to read the great works of the Western canon is key. According to noted University of Chicago political scientist Leo Weinstein, exposure to the best minds of the past offers “the clearest gateway to understanding our contemporary situation.”

Every generation struggles when entering the labour market. But, Bauerlein argues, millennials are surprised that employers “value(s) specific competence more than anyone’s self-esteem.” Brooks adds that when a generation habituated to unquestioning adulation enters a labour market in which competition is global “the approval bath stops. The world doesn’t know your name or care who you are.” That’s a shock for a generation used to “years of being coddled in schools without failure and provided unearned rewards and medals for mediocre performance so their feelings wouldn’t be hurt or egos threatened,” as David and Daniel Barnhizer write in The Artificial Intelligence Contagion.

Millennials seem to have especial difficulty grasping economic issues. This is also evident in their unthinking support of what they call “socialism.” (Bauerlein cites polls showing American youth is evenly divided on capitalism versus socialism). But most young people do not understand that socialism means government ownership of the means of production and therefore government provision of all goods and services — a concept discredited in post-war Russia and China and every time you wait for a medical appointment or apply for a passport. The generous social safety net youths mistake for socialism is actually just a poorly functioning capitalist economy increasingly suffocating under a huge overlay of taxes, transfers, and regulations. Moreover, millennial support for socialism and equality is contradictory: a TD Ameritrade survey found 53 per cent of millennials still believe they will one day be a millionaire (though at current inflation rates they’ll all eventually be millionaires).

These deficiencies in millennials’ understanding of the world are not just a failure of intellect and education. It is certainly ironic that the connectedness offered by social media has spawned an epidemic of loneliness, but steadily declining youth mental health reflects more than simply a destructive obsession with screen time. Brooks argues a lack of morality leads to a focus on self rather than the well-being of others. David Foster Wallace agrees: “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.” Brooks recommends turning off the screen, which too often acts as a mirror to yourself, and getting involved in the outside world, so as to encourage both the ego reduction and broader understanding of one’s place in society that increase engagement with community and, ultimately, happiness.

Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.