And yet home ownership rate is higher today than it was at any time between (1965-1997) with an upward trend. If housing was so easily affordable back "then", why didn't everybody buy a house?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...
Big media sells fear. Social media amplifies rage. They both create a miasma of doom that isn't reflective of the upward trajectory we've been on and continue to ride.
The Boomer era economics were not the norm and comparing ourselves to them is a great deception. Postwar America was growing and factory to the entire world. That was unsustainable and the differential between the US and the rest of the world (especially developing economies in Asia) has diminished. We can't compare Boomer McMansions and low cost of infrastructure and development to our modern state in any sort of fairness. Our wages grew too much, and that's a good thing! (Automation will bring us right back to this recipe anyway, and we're getting there.)
Compare America today against the broader world history and you'll see that we're wealthy, growing, and improving by almost all measures.
I refuse to believe a future where me and all my community have a home and stable lives is unattainable, and anyone who tries to rationalize why we should be happy with scraps deserves their fate of a pitiful of indenture to Amazon
Material reality would be something measured in objective material benefits enjoyed.
Everything people read and consume today teaches them to feel things are worse because doomscrolling produces greater engagement.
It’s the same reason people feel “injured” (offended) by things that boomers in their day would find laughable.
It’s incredibly profitable to sell people their own discontent.
There isn't a way to transmute "stuff consumed" into enjoyment/utility/value. We can sort of guess that people who were near starvation but are now eating regularly are somehow doing better, but we are so incredibly far from that world that it's worth asking ourselves whether it is really the same thing at all to say people with more TVs in their homes are better off.
You're right about doomscrolling though. But there again, people are doing it more. It adds to GDP. Are people better off?
Averages might be going up, but they are averages: an attempt to boil down a large number of data points into a single number.
Sometimes social media can make things falsely exaggerated. But often, it just seems that way, when really it's just that more people are saying something in a more visible way. That's amplification, but not in the "false" sense.