This is an interesting comment but I think your perspective is too narrow. "Settling down", "buying a house", and getting into a "top school" are all very, very modern inventions, certainly not the historical norm. Most of these problems were introduced with industrialization, meaning they're very new to the human race.

It is true that people have always had to work, but work isn't necessarily debilitating or unsatisfactory, even if it's manual labor. Consider that a family that owns a farm does have to get up early and does have to work hard to keep their farm operating, but they're not stuck in a cubicle sitting in the same spot under artificial light for 8 hours a day, they can usually take a break as they desire within reasonable parameters, and their work is objective and task-based, not arbitrarily defined by a PHB slaving half of the company under his ego. Farm work connects the worker with the land, with the animals, and produces a tangible, necessary product, that each person needs. If you own a farm, you don't need anyone's permission to live; you have the land, you have the food sources, you have the structures, and you don't need to get continued dispersion from an employer to not lose all of it. Such persons are truly independent. While some may not want to work on a farm, industrial work is not objectively superior by any stretch.

It is also true that maturity involves accepting the realities such as they are and doing what you can to improve the situation instead of belly-aching about it.

Propagandists in the West have done a good job of making everyone feel that anyone who lives less-industrialized lifestyle is an unfortunate, backwards idiot, but I don't think that's accurate. Consider that humans have defaulted to a basic set of biologically-linked behaviors throughout their history: people didn't used to "go out on their own" and delete their parents' progress for the family, people lived in tribes and clans (which, generally speaking, were small groups of families that reached a size large enough to qualify for a larger designation) and shared the land and the fruits of labor among themselves. People didn't used to delay biological imperatives like child-bearing in order to collect certificates and approvals from governing bodies. Generations were bound together with a tangibility and mutual concern that we don't know here in the U.S. of A., where almost everyone is a stranger.

The industrial oligarchs have set up a system that centers on debt. That's why the propaganda puts down inheritance and other arrangements that mitigate the need of anyone to pay interest. Industrialization has turned every American into its indentured servant, as it's very difficult to maintain a good standard of living without relying on high-interest loans for most of life's substantial necessities: it's presumed that you'll be taking out big loans to provide for shelter, transportation, and education and training, and then it's highly encouraged to do the same for anything and everything else. And that's just the private sector; the government taxes away a large amount of the personal wealth generated every year. Personally, I hope I can claw my way out of this pit and give lands and monies to my posterity such that they don't have to live their lives based on someone else's ability to collect interest. I want them to be truly independent and my goal is provide that to them, and raise them to be competent to manage it. I hope it stays in the family for many generations and saves large numbers of my posterity from indentured servitude.

There is absolutely much that has been lost in modern society. I don't want to paint a rosy picture and pretend there was never revolt, discontent, or war before industrialization, because there certainly was, but most people then, as most people now, simply wanted to live their own lives in a reasonable degree of personal comfort and satisfaction (which includes providing useful labor to the community), and one could argue that their systems were more supportive of that than ours.