There aren't many jobs where you can move up without moving out, or funding your own company. The information era worker is more like an entrepreneur (seeking opportunities where he can apply knowledge/experience and negotiating pay, working conditions) than the industrial era worker.
That's really what it comes down to, doesn't it?
Gone is the perception that a company will take care of you, that there is anything worth saving up for, because any student of recent history is acutely aware of how arbitrarily things can be taken away--because of a shitty cop, because of a medical bill, because of "because fuck you that's why".
Things are a lot less stable than they appear.
Seriously, if you're not paranoid, you haven't been paying attention for the last decade.
The grim truth is that there is no alternative.
Savings and insurance won't save you from a lot of complicated costs that come out of healthcare, which you can't bound cleanly. You can end up with a lot of extra costs (due to missing work and so forth) if you are stuck following your insurance provider's network. Preventative care (even normal, regular checkups) is nontrivial to obtain unless you have good insurance and the time and money to use it. The "family doctor" doesn't exist for most millenials--recall that the system was so fucked they passed legislation to let young adults stay on their parents' insurance until their mid-20s.
Investing is nice if you've got the money and assets to spare, and even so consider the general perceived trustworthiness of these investment funds; 2008 wasn't that long ago.
Then there's student loans--if you got a decent education (or even a worthless one that was marketed well), you're looking at tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt, due monthly, no excuses.
So, go add the cost of cars, the cost of student (or house, or car, or whatever) loan maintenance, the cost of insurance, the cost of having a phone and internet (and maybe cable). We've (more really, our parents and the Boomers) constructed a society and civilization with way too much "fuck you got mine" and way too little upwards mobility (or even security!). You should realize that the deck is stacked very heavily against people not born with a spoon in their mouth.
It's not impossible by any stretch--I'm lucky enough to be managing myself, for example--but you have to consistently make a lot of choices that are at best difficult and at worst impossible in modern society.
So, yeah, I'm cynical.
People who plan for the future will win the future. People who never expect to make it the future will be surprised when they get there (maybe a good surprise, but maybe a bad one).
