I was thinking about your comment and came back. I’m nearly 39 so a similar age.

First of all. What if you put your phone down, got off the internet and had a look around at your life and what is happening directly in your world. I’ll bet it’s not as chaotic as it feels when we see crazy headlines everywhere. You get up, chat with your family if you are lucky enough to live with someone, perhaps you go to work and interact with your coworkers or clients, hopefully the day isn’t too stressful. Come home, think about what you will have for dinner and hope it doesn’t make you too fat. Go to bed. You might squeeze in some time for hobbies, or visiting friends on the weekends.

Sure, housing is a massive problem right now, but financial bleakness isn’t new - imagine how it felt to live through the great depression? I’m in Australia, but a couple of years ago we had my son’s birthday at this nice lookout at the top of a hill. There was a plaque there that read that the road to the top of the hill was built by men during the depression in exchange for food to feed their families. The more kids you had the more hours you had to work. It was like 5 or more kids was a mandatory 12 hour day.

That would have felt bleak and like there was no way out.

Imagine getting caught up in world war 2? You would think the world had now really gone to shit. It was so traumatizing to the population here that every tiny town has a plaque of all the people who died from it. The names in the list are usually longer than the population of the town right now.

Then after the war, stuff like the threat of atomic war, nuclear winters and the entire earth dying because of a conflict escalation.

You described my childhood experience perfectly, but we might have just been very lucky and grew up in an optimistic decade full of rationality and scientific progress.