They were born and came of age during the most prosperous period in American history and just assumed things would always be that way. They assumed housing would always be affordable and plentiful and a college degree would always be a ticket to the middle class and upper management and if you just kept your head down and worked hard you'd always climb the corporate ladder. They passed these false assumptions down to their children late Gen X and millennials even as the economy shifted before their eyes. I think a lot of anti-capitalist sentiment among millennials and zoomers is because their parent's taught them assumptions about the economy that were only true when they were growing up. They never bothered with the fundamentals.