I spent a couple weeks in Poland exactly in August 2013 and I distinctly remember a huge Firefox OS billboard on the Warsaw Central train station building.

It’s still a drop in the ocean for reddit and the people who left (or just spend less time on it) were never the target audience of this “new course”. Reddit will be just fine.

both parents out of the house working

This was largely the norm even in the western world up until the late 1940s. What sucks is that in the process we’ve lost “the village” to help raising kids and now couples just try and power through on their own.

Me in 2012 after spending weeks downloading missing library after missing library to compile Gnome Shell on some irrationally obscure distro.

a 20 year debt to society

It could actually be way more than that when you consider retirement (in much of the western world at least). You also can’t really “have agency over yourself” in the sense you mean without making use of what society puts at everyone else’s disposal (roads/internet/currency/etc), and freeloading comes with all sorts of drawbacks because society is shaped in a way that doesn’t reward it for obvious reasons.

I guess the point is you’re middle aged in regards to your contribution to society. First 15-20 years of your life you pretty much just “take”, while the following 50ish you are expected to chip in. In those terms, 50 sounds about right as being referred to as “middle aged”.