No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

I fully believe (though despise) the harsh but true evidence that I have seen in my life. Love is a lie, children are a burden, the future is bleak, etc. I would love to live in a world of community, great for kids, having a family is awesome, etc., but that's not where we live. Best to live for short-term rewards and after I die let the rest of the humans destroy themselves. I won't add another person to the madness.

When you can see that nothing we can do can derail the train headed for the cliff, and that the game theory at play has reduced relationships to transactional, short-lived interactions, you can choose to "hope for the best" and get burned, or just check out, try to enjoy your short term by working as little as possible in the machine, and then ending it if you get too old/sick to enjoy anymore.

A good example is just watching the lib/conserv and pro/anti male sentiments in this thread. It just makes it glaringly obvious that seriously participating in this system is an exercise in futility.

Its kinda like starting a game of monopoly with all the spaces owned. I'm gonna role the dice and I assume I'm not getting ahead. But I'm sure as hell not going to get invested, invite more people to play, or do more to enrich the bastards who setup such a crappy game in the first place.

Middle class is deeply demolished, pushed to far lower level of wealth, high, but not so high class start seeing a possible escape toward a new neofeudal class but present situation is too liquid to been able to spot a right place and development plan, the only reasonable target is being flexible and diverse as much as possible, and that for young of the first cohort means the certainty of a future worse than that of their parents, witch fuel unrest and abandonment not taking careers since so far no one taught as you want seems to appear. For the second cohort that means try avoiding a career at all to avoid being trapped preferring gambling on family money waiting for the appearance of a more defined future. Both those cohort are acculturated enough to know that in anything the first pioneers who arrive, the frontier/first line will suffer and die quickly, the seconds, thanks to the knowledge of the pioneers prosper and the third will arrive late to prosper.

Poor know that they will be poorer but that is sold as not a such bad thing, they say society keep going in the end, humans are there for millennia and while there was good and bad moments for the real poor situations have mostly improved a bit, having seen a potential "in 2030 you'll own nothing and be happy" many of that cohort trust or at least desperately hope that that's will be the case.

So IMO essentially all "social classes" except for a very thin and more and more thinner élite see a bad future and no interest to do anything positive, some because there is no logic possible plan to go through the storm some because they think the storm is already around them and they can just hope not knowing because of lack of culture the classic una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

Honestly, myself, coming from a wealthy family who can afford essentially anything we might reasonably want having a good personal social position, I have many ideas but still deeply hesitate because so far I can't see anything defined enough in the medium-long term. Schools was a deep delusion, at first I study at home with family selected teachers and with wonderful results confronted with my friends. At high school I decide to go to a school and the result was shockingly bad, I literally lived on income for almost all the time, having already more knowledge than the demand. At uni another delusion, programs seems to be designed to form Ford-model stereotypical workers just at an a bit formally higher level. That's was extremely demotivating and I do not know how can be for those who haven't even see something else.

Long story short it's more than mere no expectation: the modern society being way too elitist have deprived of any expectation anyone, promoting and rewarding mediocrity, crushing those who have personal expectations and desire with the clear aim of creating a society of useful idiots in the classic Greek sense, human-robots to be bolted is a pre-defined system. In that environment young can choose between:

- being criminals;

- being terrorists, as a sub-type of criminals whose target is more political and long term than for short-term profit;

- being nihilists abandoned on the screen to just see the world run as a spectacle.

I fear that there is no non-destructive ways out of such impasse. We are so folded in such a crappy social model that a war, a full-scale tragedy seems to be the least devastating option to change. History however tell that such movements never goes as planned, so plans are deeply needed and incredibly hard, while we all know that nothing will go according to the plan anyway, the needed plan is just a pre-digested guide to hope being successfully counter possible development in shorter times... That's stressful enough to made most just hopeless and a few minority neurotic and angry enough to being unable to do much more than quick shots guided by anger and emotions in general.

What does that mean? Is everyone going to attend college and become coders? Who is going to collect the trash. In my home country the dominant job opportunity is subsistence farming, people still manage.