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.
Your argument regarding the airbnb driving up houses in your area is a valid one but the real issue is a shortage of homes, and the resolution is for someone that wants great financial success to assume risk and build more. Something often forgotten in castigating the rich is that many of them took on a massive amount of risk to succeed and in doing so provided jobs for others.
If the youth are unable to determine what their own version of success looks like then that's on them, you figured out yours, why cant everyone else? Honestly the root cause of your issue is likely globalization, manufacturing and livable blue collar jobs were lost because other countries were willing to do the work for far cheaper. This forced the United States to elevate financial services / software / thought leader style jobs with high salaries concentrated in fewer hands.
This is only one example of what the hyper individualism mixed with capitalism for the sake capitalism creates in terms of disincentives for normal healthy communities
Other people just want other things, and that’s OK too.
Yeah, but American/human mating rituals being what they are, it's not like you'll be getting married and having kids in that situation.
Yes, everything is interdependent, and the myth of the separate individual is only a capitalist materialistic concept used to pit us against each other.