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One useful lens for understanding the millennial identity crisis is the simultaneous thinning-out, dissolution or disruption of long-standing social substrates for intimacy, self-development & meaningful work.
It's actually useful in a lot of contexts to look for "social substrates" — environments or converging environmental factors that enable & encourage individual or cooperative behavior that's otherwise really hard or not even salient as a possibility
Jobs are a substrate for meaningful work — most people will get more done, produce more value & capture more value for themselves through wages if they can spend most of their time doing what they're good at and leave everything else (e.g. business admin) to their employers.
Successful companies are dying faster. Most employees can't grab a good job somewhere and just stay put. Employment security has shifted from work ethic + loyalty to demonstrable in-demand skills, while emerging tech is causing "in-demand skills" to be increasingly unpredictable 
Meanwhile, higher ed is becoming more costly and more consumer-driven. The customer is always right, especially when the customer has a gov-backed six-figure loan and wants to Make It Rain. Does the customer want a rigorous education? Check out Rate My Professor, get back to me
Recap: relatively mediocre young people are taking on tremendous debt to pay off institutions incentivized to certify them no matter what, and they're entering a business environment where they'll be just fine as long as they're highly skilled with an eye trained on emerging tech
Marriage & sex rates have plummeted. At best, having a family is an Old Timey choice; at worst, Do You Breeders Hate The Environment? Gender relations are increasingly unhinged, Tinder's the default for meeting people & nobody can afford to give up a rent-controlled studio anyway
I think a lot of young people are praying this job'll last long enough to get them out from under their crushing debt, hoping that whatever they do will still need doing for 40 more years & wishing *someone* would love them in a way they never learned to love anyone else
What can anyone do with all this? I don't know. But I really like @EricRWeinstein's closing comments from his recent appearance on the MIT Artificial Intelligence podcast.
"You really want to court authoritarian control in our society because you can’t see that people may not be able to defend themselves in the marketplace because the marginal product of their labor is too low to feed their dignity as a soul?"
