If young Americans fortunate to be living in a cool city and on a path to six-figure salaries are sick with worry, how should truck drivers and bellhops be feeling?

Kirk Johnson of the New York Times penned a piece about millennial coders-in-training in Seattle concerned about the swerves awaiting them tomorrow even though thus far they’re the lucky ones. You could say they lack a sense of history about the level of challenges Americans have had in the past–and you’d be right–but they do have a point. If driverless cars and elevator-riding robots are coming for delivery people and hotel employees, respectively, then isn’t it possible that soon coding itself will be an undesired skill? And that’s just one anxiety, before figuring in our poisonous political season, rampant gun violence, geopolitical headaches, etc. Despite all that, millennials in Syria would still love to trade places with them.

The opening:

SEATTLE — Part of Jillian Boshart’s life plays out in tidy, ordered lines of JavaScript computer code, and part in a flamboyant whirl of corsets and crinoline. She’s a tech student by day, an enthusiastic burlesque artist and producer by night. “Code-mode” and “show-mode,” she calls those different guises.

“My mother got stage fright for me,” she said on a recent night while talking about her childhood performances and dreams. She looked like a 1940s starlet in a tight, black sequined dress, a red rose pinned into her red hair. “I like to be prepared,” she said. “I like to be in control.”

At age 31, she seems to be. This year she won a coveted spot at a nonprofit tech school for women here, whose recent graduates have found jobs with starting salaries averaging more than $90,000. Seattle, where she came after college in Utah to study musical theater, is booming with culture and youthful energy.

But again and again, life has taught Ms. Boshart, and others in her generation, that control can be elusive. In the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, her family lost the college savings they had been putting aside for her. Her father, a nurse, was laid off after 35 years on the job. Her sister and brother-in-law lost their house in the throes of the Great Recession. And very little in the world around Ms. Boshart has led her to feel a sense of comfort and ease: not the soaring costs of living in Seattle, not the whirlwind roar of reinvention in the tech world, certainly not the barbed clamor of national politics. Even for someone who seems to have drawn one of her generation’s winning hands, it feels like a daunting time to be coming of age in America.

“I don’t just expect things to unfold, or think, ‘Well, now I’ve got it made,’ because there’s always a turn just ahead of you and you don’t know what’s around that corner,” she said.•