There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead).

It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples:

- A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone.

- That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere.

- Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay.

- A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot).

I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations.

[0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.