I think what some older people mean by this is that the younger generation have had life easy and won't know what to do when rough events happen to them. What the older people don't remember is that rough events happen to nearly everyone. It's just different events.

People today don't know how to do some of the physically demanding work of the 1970's, but we either have other physically demanding jobs or have to compete with 500 other people for a bot to read our résumé on Indeed or both.