In a deep dive this week, The Wall Street Journal complied many of the familiar grievances of America’s luckiest generation. “Playing Catch-Up in the Game of Life,” reads the headline. “Millennials Approach Middle Age in Crisis: New data show they’re in worse financial shape than every preceding living generation and may never recover.”

Like most articles of this genre, the Journal fails to stress that most millennial tribulations—and, really, sweeping statements about any arbitrary generational grouping is a ham-fisted way to talk about people—are largely driven by the choices it makes rather than a sorry state of our politics, economy, or science, which, as I write here, favors younger people in every quantifiable way.

The WSJ article, for instance, notes that millennial households “had an average net worth of about $92,000 in 2016, nearly 40% less than Gen X households in 2001, adjusted for inflation, and about 20% less than baby boomer households in 1989.”