Imagine you're 22. For the last 17 years you've showed up every day for an institution. It provided a schedule, a routine, social interaction with a community of peers who share common ground, even explicitly structured extracurricular events.

One day that just comes to a hard stop. You're sitting in your childhood bedroom on a computer. Your friends have all scattered to the wind. What now?

Of course it's possible to build a life from scratch, without the benefit of an institutional attachment. You can enforce a schedule for yourself. You can go chat up strangers in bars or meetup groups or whatever, and build a social network that way. But it's not hard to see how this level of flexibility, so suddenly, could be suffocating.

Contrast with a mid-career professional who already has a spouse, a well-developed social network gathered from the many communities he's been part of over the years, and the structure/routine of childrearing.