I’ll only respond to the last bit of this because the rest of it is you trying to make your limited life experience somehow relevant while never actually disagreeing with my statements. You're doing that weird Twitteresque thing where you don't really disagree but you're kind of disagreeing not by engaging in the substance of the argument but rather by making these weird allusions to something else. It's like whataboutism, but without the what about.

>>Tell me, was 9/11 not once in a lifetime? (again, remember that this was in response to events that people my age and older have lived through). Has Covid not been "reasonably" described as "once in a lifetime"? I know a lot of people described the 2008 recession as "once in a lifetime"? Was the mob on Jan 6 not "Once in a lifetime"? Would the Ukraine war not have qualified as "once in a lifetime" two decades ago? People have finally stopped using the term except as a "lol, yet another 'once in a lifetime' experience".
The point is as much when my generation is coming of age as when we're raised. Half of us see no possible way to improve our standard of living - self improvement is hard when you need two or three full time jobs to survive.

9/11 was not a once in a lifetime event. Oklahoma City was bombed just 6 years prior by a domestic terrorist, so terrorism isn’t new. Someone flew a plane into an NYC skyscraper back in the 40s. The combination of planes and terrorism may have been novel, but hardly “once in a lifetime.” People probably died in the 9/11 attacks that had perpetrated their own version of terrorism overseas (recognizing that “terrorism” is subjective) in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or any other number of other countries.

The war in Ukraine is hardly once in a lifetime. There is almost always a war going on in Europe historically, and prior the the Ukraine war there was the annexation of Crimea, the fallout from the USSR’s dissolution, the constant problems in the Near East, the Bosnian-Serbian problems, etc etc etc etc.

Even Covid the disease was not a once in a lifetime event. The once in a lifetime event with Covid is our response and collective hysteria. Prior to Covid there was SARS, AIDS, avian flu, swine flu, etc etc etc. but we didn’t freak out about these problems.

January 6 is also not a once in a lifetime event. The country rumbles on in spite of a bunch of morons protesting. That’s happened constantly for our country’s history: people get mad, people protest, sometimes people burn stuff down, and the country moves on. Sometimes we use these types of events to take away people’s civil liberties, and it looks like this will be another one of them if certain political parties get their way.

And yeah, people have stopped using the term except as a joke because that’s what it is. It’s clickbait. It must be tough to realize you’ve been manipulated by advanced clickbait algorithms for most of your adult life into thinking that the world is The Worst It’s Ever Been and that you’re in The Most Important Time of All Time.

PS - you post on hn, so I find it statistically unlikely that you see no possible way to improve your standard of living in one of the most juiced job markets of all time for intellectual white collar jobs. If you can’t improve your standard of living on a tech salary then it’s because you’re already living at a standard so high above everyone else in the world’s that you’ve lost perspective.