It's incredibly ironic that you're accusing the parent post of "assuming a level of insight into people’s meta-knowledge of their own mental state" while up and down the thread you're making gigantic reactionary assumptions about what cultural factors are causing teens to feel less fulfilled today. It feels good and easy to pine for the "good old days" where 50% of kids flipped burgers at McDonald's or whatever but the fact of the matter is, given how many confounding variables there are, you're just as clueless as anyone else about this.

If we're going to make random stabs in the dark and bring in our own bargain basement personal opinions into this, I can tell you at least that interacting with my abusive family much less has only been fantastic for my mental health. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, but maybe that's not important and I should just universalize this viewpoint like you, right?