“I don’t know anything different,” my daughter admitted in a conversation the other day. “This is the way the world has always been for people my age.”

She’s thirty-three years old and she holds no notion that the American dream is still alive and well.

When she was 17, and the recession started in earnest under Obama’s presidency, the housing market went bust. Just as she came into adulthood, she watched as people on the news and in our community lost their jobs and their homes.

Thankfully, after college, she found a good position working in events for a major sports team, but the owners are more worried about hosting million dollar birthday parties than they are giving their hard-working employees raises. She knows this, even accepts it. Greed is a theme she has grown up with. In a decade or more of working for this organization, she has never gotten a raise, although she’s frequently singled out, even promoted, for her work ethic.

Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X–they’ve stopped identifying with the world the Baby Boomers knew. Very little from the Boomer years holds true anymore, except rumors of a dream that their parents’ once embraced. My childrens’ world has been populated by wars for dominance, with school shootings, rising inflation, increasing infertility, the fright of the grocery store receipt, and, recently, a presidential candidate was shot on television. My daughter has grown up in a traumatic world. Let’s just call it what it is.

I think it’s fair to say most people in her age group have given up on all sorts of dreams, from home ownership to vacations, to upward mobility. That’s the key phrase here: given up. And isn’t that the point to all of this? We’re being conditioned to alter our expectations about life so we can participate in the wealthy populist’s green dreams. Of course, in their version of events, they get to keep their real estate and private jets.

Younger people leaving our country has become a thing. One Millennial I read about was diagnosed with lupus, but her insane work hours kept her from managing her illness and the disease continued to progress. She decided to move to Turkey, and you know what her American doctor told her? “Go,” he said. “The quality of food is better there and your stress levels will go down.”

My friend’s daughter, who is 35, married an Irishman and they’re packing up and selling their house in Massachusetts to move to Ireland. She told me the food there is of higher quality, education is better, and she looks forward to living in a close-knit community.

Children of immigrants are leaving, too. One young man written about in a Newsweek article joined the military but became disillusioned recently when his time was up with the Marines. He said the assassination attempt on Trump was the last straw for him.

“There’s no one on this planet who could be that bad of a person that we need to assassinate just to keep them out of the presidency,” the young man said. “How radical the American culture and society is getting in its entirety is making me go, ‘I really need to get out of here.'”

Another woman, a Fulbright Scholar, who was interviewed for the same article, said she was leaving for Asia. Her parents had moved to the U.S. many years ago from Vietnam to give their children a better life, but she, too, is ready to cut ties with her birthplace.

“I think American politics is a joke,” she said. “I think we’re seeing that no matter which party is in power, no matter which face it is, it’s kind of the same system.”

According to a recent survey from a company called Preply, more and more young people are thinking of leaving the country. They surveyed 3,000 Gen Z Americans on whether they would consider moving out of the country, and the average response was 3.1 out of five, meaning Gen Z leans more toward wanting out than staying in.

Gen Z is often called “the school shooting generation,” and while I’m a big proponent of the right to carry arms, especially in turbulent times like this, I don’t blame Gen-Zs for their hard-earned opinions on what it is to be an American.

If they’re not moving out of the country, they’re most definitely moving out of cities. An analysis, done by a think tank called the Economic Innovation Group, noted that the under-5 populations of Mid-Atlantic cities declined more than 10 percent and those of West Coast cities fell more than 8 percent since the pandemic.

This means young families are getting out of Dodge. And major southern cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston are “hollowing out” of children as families move from the denser cities to their lower-density suburbs.

I can’t help but wonder if my grandkids will be wearing a sombrero one day, or dodging sheep on a country lane. The future, especially for our children, is a mystery.