I think feeling out of touch with my generation has been a hallmark of my life for the past ten years. I mean, I've always been a little odd and never did fit in as a teenager except with my niche group of gamer friends at school, but it's been about ten years that I've specifically not identified as a 'Millennial' in the demographic sense.
Most of 'us' live in cities, or want to, and idealize trendy condos; I moved to Idaho from California, own a house on 5 acres and have never looked back.
Most of 'us' become more technology-saturated as time goes on, and can't live without social media. I've gone the other direction; I've abandoned most contemporary social media, and have drastically less tech-saturation than I did as a teenager in a tech-heavy house.
So on and so forth.
It's easy to read articles like that and get really downtrodden. I have done that plenty and I would say it actually worsened my loneliness and depression when I was struggling with them. But the important thing to remember about these studies and surveys is two fold:
1. Statistics can be manipulated based on sample size and focus
2. Statistics can be reported in a skewed way to favor a point of view.
Regardless, I would hazard a guess that most of us here would fall in the outliers category. But that's okay. I used to think I had to conform to find someone, and tried it for a long time. What I discovered was that I'm too strong-willed for that and wasn't fooling anybody; more importantly, the woman who I would meet and eventually marry -very beautiful, honest, and kind by the way, for everyone who thinks it can't happen- wouldn't have wanted 'that guy' anyways.
My observation is that to get away from the typical demographic, you have to vacate the areas where they live. You need to look for Sandpoint or Kalispell, as opposed to Portland or Seattle. I have to accept that I'm just not going to have all the talked-up benefits of urban life if I don't want to be around urban people. Frankly I'm more than fine with that; the air is cleaner and I don't think I could have a personal shooting range in any of Portland's bedroom communities. My coworker's hip, career-oriented millennial daughter just moved to the tech/liberal bastion of San Francisco. A dream to most people my age...except she's sending back mostly stories about extreme wealth gaps, literal piles of human excrement on the sidewalks (somehow related to rampant public drug use, but I forget how she was explaining it) as a regular sight, and nightmare stories of using public transport.
But the facade is there, and that's what they want, so they can keep it. I do worry for future generations, as I think this is going to get worse; relationships will become more shallow and our lives will become more focused on the instant. The article actually mentions some problems associated with that. There are others. It will certainly be a Brave New World.