I'm 46 years old, putting me at the very beginning of the GenX generation. I have a teenage daughter who is just now entering both college and the work force, so I have a good perspective of what her life (and her cohort's lives) are like as well.

The boomers lives were marked by positive economic trends from birth - oil was cheap and domestically produced. Five years of war after a decade long depression had left the US fallow for economic growth, and unemployment was nearly non-existent by 1960. Given those trends, pension and social security plans made a great deal of sense (and also provided a handy source of effectively mythical money to be tapped into politically). The likelihood of working for one company for your entire life was high, which meant that you had little chance for economic disruptions in your life, and the real wages were increasing up to about the mid-1970s.

After 1973, the US became a net oil importer. We entered a major economic recession, one which in general affected younger workers far more than it did the mid-level managers that were what the forefront of the boomer generation had become. The corporate friendly 1980s marked the peak earning years for those self-same boomers, meaning that their incomes were often supplanted with bonuses, increased stock options and other non-salaried benefits which could in turn be invested. Meanwhile, those starting out in those years were likely to see 4-5 jobs in their "work lifetime", which meant economic disruption, periodically loss of pensions and similar income, depradations from financial parasites and so forth.

The 1990s saw the dot-com era, in which, at least on paper, young kids (late genXers and Millenials) could become billionaires overnight. In practice, most of them (us) ended up with lots of paper stock options that we could use to wallpaper the den with because they certainly never generated any real money, while the bulk of the money that was generated went to investors (those with high disposable incomes) who cashed in while the getting was good. Most of them were, you guessed it, Boomers.

The 2000s saw massive layoffs in the tech sector, as the money shifted over into real estate, and as senior managers (yup, Boomers) decided to save even more money outsourcing as much of the tech and manufacturing jobs as they could, while at the same time leaving them with the profit.

By this time, someone entering the workforce could expect to see their resume peppered with dozens of companies, especially if they were in tech, since the average job was now of limited duration and usually brokered through an agency that took a major slice off the top (and guess who owned most of those agencies).

Reliable insurance was a thing of the past, pension funds seem like a remarkably transient vehicle for savings (something that I think will be proved out within the next couple of years tops) and even the notion that hard work will get you to the pinnacle of success has been continually disproved in what has increasingly become a casino economy - you became wealthy if you were either friends of the casino boss or were one of the gulls that the casino would let win big occasionally to entice others to come and spend ... certainly talent and perseverance were no longer determining factors.

In the end, most of the Boomers who face a rough retirement will do so because they weren't paying attention and lost money in the recent crash - I can assure you many others will be doing quite well indeed. For the GenXers, the Millenials, the Virtuals (post 2000) its a different story - the well's been drying up for decades.

Most of the late Millenials and Virtuals, despite the laptops and cellphones, which effectively define their preferred mechanism for communication, are coming into the work force with the understanding that the till is gone, that jobs are scarce and will become scarcer still, that working for a single company (or even a handful) is dangerously naive and absurd, and that their world is going to be one defined by resource scarcity, not resource abundance. Tell a sixty-something that we've passed the peak of oil production and are now on a downward slope and they'll think you're insane. You don't have to tell a twenty-something - they know that fact implicitly.