If you need any sort of public assistance, marriage is a severe eligibility fence.
You can let the river current take you where it may, or you might plan and prepare do that you may land on a desirable bank. People have to take some control over their lives if they want to have some self determination.
> misleads youth in thinking they can make their own reality and that there are shortcuts to success for all.
Many people, like myself, are not shooting for "success". We just want to live and hang out with our family and friends. That is success. And the economic structure makes that impossible because everyone else has the idea that success means having to figure out if they can retire on $3.5 million. But in doing so it affects people like us who want to retire in the place we grew up with our family. But people who this "success" is having a lot of sht come in and buy a house and turn it into an AirBnB rental.
The reality is that capitalist advertising keeps pushing the idea of what success is out further and further. So don't blame "the youth" blame people like yourself for telling everyone else what success looks like.