You're not wrong, but I suspect that there's a widespread Whig view of history that's been present in the Western world since the end of WWII.

You think of the '90s and the prosperity there, the end of major international rivalries, the birth of the Information Age, and imagine that time will just go on forever. Each generation is supposed to live better lives than the previous generation, right? We have the technology!

And yet the past couple of decades showed that no, income inequality and rising costs of living and the impossibility of buying housing in many markets have basically depressed American (and many other Western) youth, sort of like what's been happening in Japan all this time.

The hardscrabble Ellis Island immigrants were fleeing from clearly traumatic problems. Famine, war, disease. What afflicts modern day youth? High prices, bad numbers. It's an abstract foe with no clear solutions. It's not as if they can just move to Australia or New Zealand, another frontier of economic opportunity to start anew.

You only have to be aware of the recent financial crisis, whose impact went through arguably between 4 to 6 years, to realize that enduring a simple lockdown that takes 4 to 6 weeks is a mere inconvenience, and whining about the devastating impact of staying at home for a few weeks is a kin of whining about not getting a haircut on schedule.