I disagree. How your life proceeds for the first 5-10 years of your life has a strong influence on your general outlook on life. Obviously it is not a 1:1 correlation, but it is by now a widely accepted trusim that children born into famine come out with much different perspectives on life than those born into surplus.

The strong economic growth during the postwar period created a culture with a truly utopian outlook on how technology is applied to improving lives. There was not the recognition there is today that it is possible (indeed, common) to consume resources at an unsustainable, destructive, rate, nor to comprehend the magnitudes and qualities of the effects that our consumption and pollution could have on the quality of life of future generations.

Peopple born in the last 40 years have weathered the effects of Reaganomics on the economies of the world. People born in the past 10-20 years have felt the ramifications of a massive recession during the early years of their lives. All the above-mentioned people are by now old enough to know who is to blame for those massive failures. This has apparently engendered a more cynical, or at least skeptical, perspective on how the future might proceed based on our current trajectory, compared to the more techno-utopian visions of the mainstream boomer mindset.

And yet, people younger than the boomer set trade convenience for privacy and such all the time. Just look at social media use alone.

From what I can see, all generations are equally likely to trade some amount of personal freedom for convenience. The exact things they're willing to trade may or may not be different, but the principle seems a constant.

No one here said younger generations are capable of similar. What is being said here is the over-arching early-life experience of those born in the Baby Boomer generation differs from that of later generations on the basis of economics and the resulting socioeconomic hopes and fears of the milieu, and that this difference colors the ways people of different generations interpret themselves and the systems they inhabit.

Citing exceptions has little to do with the conversation at hand, for the obvious reason that different people grow up in different socioeconomic situations even within the same generation. Nonetheless, a clear pattern emerges in attitudes towards this or that "personal freedom" on the basis of what a person can imagine can be done with those freedoms. These are obviously culturally-based attitudes, and obviously cultures differ between generations.

What about this are you finding so controversial?

I'm not necessarily finding what you're saying controversial on its face. I think my mistake is in trying to relate it to what I was saying in the first place. I think we're having two entirely different conversations here.