[September 19, 2026] This is a well written and thought out article written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who’s in grad school for her MBA.
What a GREAT perspective…
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us! First published in an Alpha News article.
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!!!
Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful. ??
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth.
Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided.
My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country.
People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
Why? The answer is this,?? my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or we didn’t see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.”
NOTE: Hat tip to Todd Kaime on Facebook. I couldn’t link to his Facebook Page but you can find him there.
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Please read my books:
A View From the Coffee Shop Window
(Look up photo: American Gothic by Gordon Parks
Sitting in a Florida coffee shop, surrounded by laptops, smartphones, instant conveniences, and the everyday comforts of modern life, she concludes that much of the growing enthusiasm for democratic socialism stems not from economic reality but from entitlement and ingratitude.
It’s a well-written piece.
Thoughtful, too. At least thoughtful enough that I couldn’t quite let it go.
Because while I think she sees something important, I also think she mistakes one view of America for America itself.
She sits in a coffee shop, looks around at laptops, smartphones, cars passing outside, people ordering expensive coffee drinks, and concludes that America has become blind to its own prosperity.
I suppose that’s one way to see it. It also strikes me as an awfully large conclusion to draw from a remarkably small window.
The piece begins with an observation and quickly becomes a judgment. Young people are entitled. Young people are ungrateful. Young people don’t recognize prosperity when they see it.
That’s a lot of people to diagnose from a seat near an espresso machine.
What Ahlgren sees is incomplete. America has always looked prosperous from its prosperous corners.
The more interesting question is what lies beyond the frame.
As I read her essay, I kept thinking about Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee. Not because they photographed poverty. That’s the easy takeaway.
They understood something deeper. If you want to understand a country, move the camera.
Turn a few degrees. Walk a few blocks. Look where nobody is looking. The story changes.
The America visible from a Starbucks window is America. So is the America standing in line at a food pantry.
So is the America where families live one medical emergency from financial trouble.
So is the America where workers put in forty or fifty hours a week and still worry about rent, childcare, and groceries.
So is the America where housing increasingly functions as an investment strategy before it functions as shelter.
These people are not hidden. They’re simply easier to miss if you’re not looking for them.
Her argument rests heavily on abundance.
Look at the phones. Look at the cars. Look at the instant deliveries. Look at the technology.
Fine. We should.
But the richest country in history ought to have smartphones. It ought to have extraordinary technology. It ought to have convenience that previous generations could barely imagine.
The question isn’t whether those things exist. The question is why so many people remain one setback away from trouble despite them.
That isn’t an anti-capitalist question. It’s an honest one.
The essay treats growing interest in democratic socialism as evidence that young people have failed to appreciate prosperity.
I’m not so sure. Maybe some people are drawn to those ideas because they notice things Ahlgren doesn’t.
They notice soaring healthcare costs. They notice housing prices disconnected from wages.
They notice corporate profits and executive compensation climbing while many workers feel stuck in place. They notice that abundance and insecurity somehow manage to exist side by side.
You don’t have to embrace democratic socialism to understand why those observations lead people to ask harder questions about the economy.
What troubled me most about the essay wasn’t the praise of prosperity. It was the certainty.
The certainty that disagreement can only be explained by entitlement.
The country is a big place. Any argument that begins with a handful of people in a coffee shop and ends with a judgment about an entire generation probably deserves a second look.
Especially when the judgment ignores so much of what remains outside the frame.
The lesson Gordon Parks left us wasn’t that America lacked prosperity. It was that prosperity alone doesn’t tell the story.
The measure of a society is not the comfort of those visible in the frame.
It’s the condition of those just outside it. That’s where photographers like Parks pointed their cameras.
It’s where journalists often find the better story.
And it’s where this essay should have looked before declaring the case closed.
GOOD ONE
Folks my age remember when a new car and a full fridge were big deals. We did not carry the world in our pockets and we still got by just fine. Kids now have more comfort than kings used to have, and they still complain. If you never go hungry, you start thinking hunger is someone else’s fault. I served long enough to see real poverty, and this is not it. Most people on earth would give anything to live like we do. Gratitude is simple, but it is not weak. Without it, a rich country can still talk itself into being poor. Great article by a young lady who can actually see that she has it good, and calls out the idiots who think they are somehow oppressed.
Sir, I guess that no one is surprised that “entitlement” is the very definition of young folks today, those who have more freedom and access to money than any other generation ever in the history of the world. And they think they are “oppressed.” And by that, they mean they aren’t getting their way every minute, just like a child.
Yep, the most privileged people in the world and history have been convinced they are oppressed. ??????????
Fred, you got that right. Like Winston siad, no surprises here.