On the Internet.
Not all Boomers did better than their parents. So why is it so horrible that some Gen Yers aren't as well off as their parents?
I'm a Boomer. My parents did fairly well. They had a 1300 sq ft house, no central AC, ate out once a quarter (and that might be Arby's), didn't see their first live play until they were retired. They had one tv in their house, no Internet until well after retirement, and their VHS recorder was a luxury. Compare that with the average expectation of a Gen Y kid: Larger house, AC, more eating out, more entertainment, and a few hundred dollars a month for connectivity. By Boomer-parent standards, a poor Gen Yer is living high on the hog. The point: It's really hard to compare across generations when tech makes really high-end stuff from the 1970s commonplace for all but the very poor in the 2010s. Gen Y folk feel poor because they're comparing themselves against a commercial, consumerist ideal they've been sold and swallowed wholesale. Slurp.
Not all Boomers, when they were 30, were as well off as their parents were when their Boomer turned 30. But it's hard to compare what your prosperity level is when you're 25 against your parents' when they were 25 since, well, the Gen Yer might have been only 5 or perhaps yet future.
There were a lot of decent paying unskilled jobs. Most of them were really unpleasant. Many of those are automated. Or sent overseas to people who don't demand $35/hr to do them. That was my mother's average wage in 1983 dollars. That's $85 in 2017 dollars. She was a steelworker. And, no, when she was 25 and working she didn't get that kind of pay. That was after 35 years' experience.
We hear about social mobility and lament that there's not a lot of people in the bottom 10% who get into the top 10%. There's 80% of the population left out of that, and there's a lot of turnover. But for every person go goes to a higher percentile, somebody else drops down to take their place. Since it's a ranking from 0 to 99, it really is a zero sum game: It will never be the case that 50% of the population is in the top 20% percentile for income. The point for this paragraph: People who move up seldom make a big deal about it; those who move down scream at what they've lost. Loss aversion is a big deal. (Similarly, complaints always outnumber positive comments, unless they're so actively solicited that the response rate gets closer to 100% Even then, people are reluctant to say good things.)
Frustration is often the result of a mismatch between expectations and reality. Most millennials and Gen Y kids I know are really out of teach with what reasonable expectations are. For any period in US history.
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I like that one. 
