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Notes -
I think for me the big issue is not having the constant worry that you have to over perform to stay in place. Up until the 1980s unless you went out of your way to screw up your life, you were generally going to live decently. Maybe not great, but decently. Parents generally didn’t have to overly worry about how good their kid was at school. He’d be fine.
To be fair I was cherry-picking some of the better lives. You could definitely screw up your life in the past by, say, working at a factory that closed down, or on a farm that was no longer profitable, or getting addicted to drugs that you didn't understand the dangers of.
It was always possible to mess up. But in the past, it was a lot harder to do so and the consequences were a lot less permanent. If you fucked up school, you aren’t doomed, you have lowered standards of living, but you could still expect a modest lifestyle where living on your own is feasible with a single job. The mythical permanent record is real, and because of credentialism it’s now not even good enough to keep your nose clean, but you need to get either blue collar job training or a college degree in the right subjects.
While modern jobs have lengthier training periods, I don’t think that failure is actually that much closer than it was- that’s just blue tribe neuroticism. If you fuck up in high school, well, transferring from community college to flyover tech is still a college degree and odds are you weren’t going to Harvard anyways. Living on your own at 70’s standards(eating at home every meal, often beanie weenies, tiny house, one car and not a nice one, no vacations except maybe camping in a state park) is still pretty in reach for most people who don’t get incarcerated or use drugs. We have social problems they didn’t, but it’s possible to bounce back from all the usual fuck ups.
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