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I would suggest that there IS still a basic life script... but there are now way more failure modes that can suck someone in and divert them from the script, often inescapably so, so life is harsher to those who aren't able, for various reasons, to detect and avoid these pitfalls before moloch snags them in his maw.
The number of ways to drastically and unknowingly screw your life trajectory up has grown. There are superstimuli everywhere, controlled by faceless entities/egregores that are exceedingly efficient at parting you from your money and depleting your wellbeing.
Go to college on loans and get a degree that has poor employment/salary prospects, spend a few years spinning wheels trying to make the career in that field before throwing in the towel and accepting some blase corporate job, leaving yourself in your mid-late twenties with a pile of debt and no meaningful experience, which you have to climb out of before your life really 'begins.'
Get addicted to one of the nastier drugs and even if you don't end up overdosing on Fent or becoming a zombified husk, you're still torpedoing your ability to acquire and hold down a decent job, stay out of jail, and achieve financial stability.
Acquire some modest life savings which you burn up in the crypto markets, or betting on stocks, or a more standard gambling addiction, given how gambling is increasingly ubiquitous, leaving you with nothing to show for it. Also the brazen and sophisticated scams that are constantly seeking out marks these days.
And, honestly, if you marry and knock up/are knocked up by the wrong partner, this can leave you pretty irretrievably damaged if they choose to go full nuclear when the relationship falls apart.
Also way easier to become a grossly obese blob. And/or a NEET.
U.S. society is rich enough that you can continue to putter along after suffering one of the above setbacks (except the overdose death), but you'll pretty much be relegated to financial destitution unless you stumble into one of the much rarer positive black swan events that gets you set for life.
And many people chasing those positive black swans get pwned by the above because accepting risk has all kinds of foreseeable AND unforeseeable effects.
No, I don't think past societies had better guardrails, and certainly, obviously had their share of risks, too. But I reckon that outside of traumatic physical injury/disfigurement (and even then!) it was much easier for the average young adult to recover from mistakes, move on, and get a 'fresh start' even if they dicked around most of their twenties. There were fewer 'instant fail' conditions that would render you unable to continue as a functional member of society..
Probably only true for men. If you were a woman, getting pregnant out of wedlock pre-Roe (and pre-modern contraception) was an instant fail, as was marrying a shit-tier guy (drunks, criminals, drifters etc.) There were also a lot of ways a young woman could breach propriety which were in effect instant fails because they made it unlikely that a non shit-tier guy would want to marry her.
It is also worth remembering that the point at which a 100-IQ hard-working guy can come back from a serious injury (even one under sympathetic circumstances like battlefield injuries or workplace accidents) that leaves him unable to do heavy manual work was post-WW2 in most places.
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