PRESSURED TO BE LEADERS OF AN UTOPIA

Does it ever seem that you are bound down by a sense of duty, a strict idea of what is 'right', and that somehow your happiness lies beyond this 'right', so maybe it's not really 'right' after all? It seems as if the young people of today are expected to do so much, be tomorrow's everything, the hope of their fellows,and the saviors of the world form undoubted and unidentifiable doom. It's as if I and my peers are not allowed to breath unless we are breathing in our tireless work to help people and save the world.
I don't understand this. Our parents perhaps had the same pressure, and as they did not live up to it, they place it on us. Generation after generation, placing their hope for the future in their children. I'd like to object to this legacy on 3 points:
1. Does the future have to necessarily be good? Considering that our parents will be dead by the time this 'future' rolls around, what do they care? If the future is not heaven, at least it is reality.
2. If the future is, by some unknown decree, supposed to be utopia and all that, why should we be the ones to bring it about if so many generations before us have obviously failed?
3. Isn' it rather ridiculous to place one's hope in one's children, especially since so much of the child's faults are inherited from the parents?
I think in this sense, the parents are the ones being irrationally idealistic, and the teenagers the ones being understandably rebellious, not because of some idea of drug and sex freedom in their own minds, but because of the perfect economy and relaxed lifestyle dream of their parents.