1) out of everyone I know, working- to middle-class, only three people 'own' a house. One of them inherited it from their father, and the other recently bought one with a mortgage and has an unusually stable job. Of the rest of us/them, I'd say a good 70% live in a flatshare (regardless of whether they're in their twenties of thirties), 20% live in a small apartment with their partner, and the remaining 10% or so have some kind of studio apartment because they make decent money or because their student organization provided them with cheap housing.

2) with the exception of those who have jobs where a pension is built up automatically, none have bothered. Which is probably about 80% of them (100+ people). And in conversation the general assumption is that any kind of pension will probably not exist by the time we need them, so why bother (not saying I agree, btw).

That said, I'd say my social network skews toward working class and educated-but-not-STEM. And urban, which favors the precariat.

However I currently live in Amsterdam, where the 47 m2 apartment I inhabit costs around 350k euros to buy, which is quite a bit for a matchbox in a 120 yr old house.

On top of that, I suspect that in NL the age of retirement for me will be around 72, which is ridiculously late; plus, whatever pension I get will almost certainly not be enough for me to have a decent life on. The state pension here is minuscule and the private ones are a racket, like everywhere else.

My point is that you can't really rely on a pension and you should act as if you won't get one (even though that's what's owed to you).