Thank you for sharing your personal experiences. I wish the government had done more for your dad's generation and yours, but the government still did more for your generation than any prior or subsequent ones.

You did get easy access to government loans. Today my university students get nothing but corporate loan shark predation. And scholarships? Forget about it! Those were long gone before I got to university thanks to Reagan. If you received even one dollar of scholarship money, that's more than my cohort or any of my students ever received.

Regarding housing, your generation had the enormous advantage of full FHA backing of mortgage loans which made home ownership far more affordable. Today, the cost of mortgages is triple what you had to pay because the government stopped the freebies of backing the loans.

Your dad having the union and the benefits for which they fought was a wonderful thing. My spouse's father received Railroad Retirement which meant that he and his spouse got free medical care, my spouse's mother received the same. Union benefits mostly disappeared by the 2000s. Anyone born after around 1980 isn't ever going to get those benefits.

Maybe you didn't mean it to sound that way, but you do sound very arrogant to suggest that only your generation knows about striving and being your best. People younger than you also know how to strive, dream, work hard, and succeed. To suggest otherwise is absurd and insulting. The advantage you had is that the US government hadn't yet adopted the anti-worker policies instituted in the 1980s and 1990s.

Finally, Twenge's quasi-mythic simplification of the generations is what my article was debunking.