Discouraging Prospects for Gen Z

 Various people have been pointing out how dismal the economic prospects Gen Z faces when compared with the generations immediately preceding them, and speculating that this is leading to discouragement and demoralization... such that one might wonder if working hard is worth it when life is going to suck anyway.  Why save for buying a house when the median age for first time homeowners is about to cross 40 years, and so on.

I would add something that I do not see being discussed.  One little project people must engage in if their culture, civilization and indeed species is to survive is the very non-technological act of starting and raising a family.  It's an economic adventure proportional to expectations; subsistence farming has fed countless families in our species and has succeeded in the absence of much of the "stuff" people have been taught to obsess over.  Despair over the prospects of starting a family need not follow from poor economic prospects.

However, forming a family is far more a matter of trust and faith in one another than it is a matter of dollars and cents.  A relatively recent innovation has had an effect on our culture in the US for most of the past 50 years.  This innovation is "no-fault divorce" and is further exacerbated by the common "guidelines" for child custody and support arrangements after such a divorce.  Anyone with enough functioning synapses to imagine the results of making a home in the caldera of an active volcano should be capable of grasping how utterly disillusioning and demoralizing it can be for a young man who is told his duty is to build and support a family when he learns how casually and callously his partner in that adventure can, and now all to often does, render his every effort futile and ultimately self-destructive.

Anyone who does not grasp this should learn how this system works and what its effects generally are.  In my opinion poor economic prospects are trumped by trust, but not when the law has made that trust abrogable at whim.  For this reason I suggest that no-fault divorce and its corollaries is a greater killer of civilization than is any amount of economic stress, and that this policy should be reversed immediately.