It could also be the fact that a Mon-Fri 9-5 job just isn’t the norm and often isn’t enough for one to live for a majority of Americans, so they have less time to learn, then make those repairs. In addition, prices for tools and materials have obviously gone up, making those repairs more expensive than “back in the day.”

Say your AC stops working at the height of summer. You go online and download the manual from the manufacturer, follow the directions to diagnose the issue. Awesome! You know what’s wrong, you just need to make a special trip to the hardware store (maybe where you live isn’t close to one since brick-and-mortar is more and more rare) and you can’t afford to wait for it to be delivered. So you buy the part and tools required at whatever price they’re selling for there because you can’t shop around. You don’t have another day off until next week, so you try to work a little bit every day on it, but you’re tired from your two jobs and only have a few hours free every day really. You’re having to stop and start constantly so you never get any momentum going on the work and it’s taking forever and the whole time you don’t have air conditioning so it’s hot as fuck. You don’t really know what you’re doing so it’s slow going. You’re losing sleep because it’s so hot and at least one of your jobs is physical and tires you out before you spend an hour tinkering with it every night. The little time that you normally get to spend with your kids is taken by this repair, and it takes almost a full week, and you have to hope you didn’t make a small mistake, because again, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just going from the manual, like “back in the day.” Or you could just dip into the savings and hire a guy to come out and fix it in an afternoon.

But you’re right, it’ probably just kids these days.