It's an interesting thread.
I think Buzz nails how much different the world is for a 20 year old right now as opposed to how it was for someone in their 50s who is reading this. For Montana in particular, I think most have no idea about housing out-of-reachness. It's largely unprecedented and the data backs that up. Over the last decade on our VFD, I've seen a handful of kids join the dept and some get fired up about firefighting and make careers out of it, or at the very least spend their first years of adulthood doing just that - some with the feds, others with the state. Unless they're on a hotshot crew, they aren't paying for a dall sheep hunt with a whole season of hard f'n work.
On the other side of my brain though, as a dad who will be sending adults out into the world, I'm drawn to a perspective that the only thing to tell them is to sacrifice, invest, work their asses off, and highlight to them that complaining about the current state of affairs will be a useless endeavour.
I think that perspective though, can only hold up so long - both for individuals and a population.
