On the one hand, as I sit before a screen, I can see, talk to, interact with people from anywhere in the world in an instant.  Just seconds ago, I deleted hundreds of spam comments from a hard-workiing fellow in Bangalore, India, who had his spambot placing them as quickly as I could delete them.

So it’s just like being there, right? Hardly. My butt stayed in precisely the same place it started, and I’ve gone absolutely nowhere. Sure, the computer gives me the impression of movement, of adventure, but the closest I came to moving a muscle below my waist was when my shin itched. Other than that, I was completely immobile.

At the curmudgeon stage of life, this isn’t uncommon. But the young are supposed to leap from the nest, spread their wings and fly.  There’s plenty of time to sit still later, once you’ve been everywhere.  Fly. Fly away.  Except the Millennials aren’t going anywhere.

But sometime in the past 30 years, someone has hit the brakes and Americans — particularly young Americans — have become risk-averse and sedentary.

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s, according to calculations based on Census Bureau data. The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000. Today’s generation is literally going nowhere.

There are so many reasons why this may be, When the world comes to you, maybe there’s no need to go out and see it. Virtual is close enough, and you don’t get your hands dirty. Or maybe you’ve grown into a tub of lard, and lifting your bulk out of the chair and moving is just too much work. Or mommy’s home is just so warm and comfortable, not to mention cheap, and the kitchen elves cook your food while the bedroom elves make your bed.

But this was a shocking newsflash:

In the most startling behavioral change among young people since James Dean and Marlon Brando started mumbling, an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent. Though it’s easy to blame the high cost of cars or gasoline, Comerica Bank’s Automobile Affordability Index shows that it takes fewer weeks of work income to buy a car today than in the early 1980s, and inflation-adjusted gasoline prices didn’t get out of line until a few years ago.

At 8:30 am on the morning of my 17th birthday, I took my road test.  By noon, I was cruising down the highway in my mother’s Cutlass Supreme, feeling a sense of freedom that was the stuff of dreams. Most of my kids’ friends don’t have drivers licenses, or any plans to get one. When I ask why, they tell me they’re afraid of the road, and rationalize that they don’t really need one. “Someone will take me wherever I need to go.” Forever? You want to spend your life relying on someone else?

All this turns American history on its head. We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother.

While a cute play on words, this lethargy reflects an abdication of the American birthright, the ability to take to the road at will and discover the world, and ourselves, at the same time. The Slackoisie have raised whining about their problems to fine art, but won’t take the risk of walking out the door to find their destiny.

At the end of summer, 1975, I drove up to Ithaca, New York to start my life. I would have cut off a limb before every thinking of moving back home. The very notion of returning to the womb would have made me sick; it was now my life, and I was going to make it happen.  Note, not wait for it to happen to me, but make it happen.

Times are different now, you say.  Jobs are tight and things are expensive. If I move back into the bedroom with the cowboy sheets, it won’t cost me anything and my clothes will be washed for me. How easy. How comfortable. You have an iPhone with four gigs of internet access, but not enough money to find an apartment on the wrong side of town? 

My first apartment had a bookcase made of discarded boards and borrowed milk crates. My television was black and white (you know, the type where every television show displayed in shades of gray) with rabbit ears. Yes, there was such a thing as color television and remote controls. I just didn’t have them.  And I couldn’t have been happier. Life was an adventure.  Stuff meant nothing. There would be plenty of time to be comfortable later, when I wasn’t bursting at the seems to get out the door and find out what new would happen today.

I traveled to Paris, living in a fourth floor walk-up in Montmartre, just below Sacre Coeur, where the fact that I didn’t know a word of French made no difference. I traveled to Tangiers, where I was strip-searched at the port because, dressed in a djellaba, I told the immigration official I was Sheik Yerbooty.  I did some naughty things as well, but I’m not telling.  I have a million experiences from my youth. You have stories of other people’s experiences.

But you can’t afford to go to Paris? Sure you can. Sell your iPad and buy a cheap ticket. When you get hungry, find a restaurant with dirty dishes or a fence that needs painting. You have student debt? You’re not paying it off sitting in the basement eating Cheetos, are you? 

Meet people. Touch their hand. Maybe one of them will ask you to come to work with them tomorrow morning. Maybe not, but you can bet you won’t meet them sitting on the couch playing Xbox.

It’s a big world out there. All those pretty images on your computer screen are of real places. Yes, it’s scary and there are many unknowns. But it’s real and it’s happening as you sit and look at them.  Take a chance. Give mom a kiss on the cheek and walk out the door. Your life is out there. Find it.