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I am a broke millennial and I am surrounded by broke millennials. I’ll refrain from generalizations, but me, my family, the people I know, we work like hell when the work shows up. There is no absence of ability or desire to work hard, there just isn’t any work. What apathy there is, is apathy born of not having a reason for being. In a regular town, not a city but a town, where rent is not starkly and hideously impossible, there are no jobs that can steer us toward the middle class. We can kill ourselves working and it won’t get us out of paycheck-to-paycheck dread and exhaustion and nerves.

There is a ceiling on what hard work can do when you’re in the stock room of a big box store. And there is a ceiling on how much hard work you’re allowed to do in the first place. When I hear millennials talk about work, it’s “I didn’t get enough hours” and “they won’t make me full time” and “I wonder why my back is so fucked up.” It is never the soulless, bloodless marketing vision statement platitudes about “authentic workplaces” and “fulfillment.” It’s not enough hours and not enough money and too much pain.

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There’s just not much to do that feels tangible and real. Jobs that make human being money, aside from the army, are illusory and largely seen on television. If you work at a Shell station in Prineville or a Kmart in Shawnee, you’ll really only know people in the service industry. There are no magic phone calls to make to get the ball rolling on changing that. You’ll have just about enough energy to hold down that job and be on the lookout for addicts who might steal from you. And college is a shot in the dark, too expensive and not enough of a sure thing to provide an exit strategy like it once did.

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Here’s the thing about Bernie Sanders. If you’re a working class millennial in 2016 and you’re not plugged into the pulse of some big city, if you didn’t get four years in the womb of a well-manicured college, politicians don’t give a shit about you. You are invisible. You are worse than invisible. You are irrelevant. Bernie Sanders isn’t campaigning on free marijuana and Xboxes. He’s not pandering to the entitlement of a bunch of kids drooling at screens. He’s just admitting that Jenny at the Modesto Dressbarn actually exists, and he’s admitting that a lot of things are ruined, and he’s saying it like he means it, and he’s providing a way out of the wreckage. Nobody else is doing that.