alt Hacker NewsSure, you can reframe things that way, if you want to reduce all dimensions of existence to money and want to try to simplify all life as being about money, sure, go nuts. I certainly can't stop you.
You could do the same kind of exercise with whatever other measurement of reality that you consider to be the pivot of existence like free time or amounts of sandwiches available or whatever (or is that also boiling down to money?).
But that really really hobbles your model of reality so much to the point it's not useful anymore.
And, then by your own standards, were they ever NOT expensive?
Is this expense some relative state to other people, as in if other people have more it means I have less by virtue of comparison or is it some concrete measure of need one can not afford nowadays and they could before.
No, my point is that you're conflating "expensive" with money
Yeah a lot of my points are about money. But it's also free time, responsibility, etc
For example my parents used to drop me off for a friends birthday party and then go away. There would be adults there who they trusted to look out for me, and they could use that time for themselves for a bit to do whatever
Nowadays parents literally stay the entire time. That's a pretty large chunk of time that my parents had to themselves and parents nowadays do not. I don't know what other term than "expensive" to describe that, but it doesn't have anything to do with money