It's certainly cause for concern but I would say the major change over the years has been that in addition to buying good and reliable things that last (and may

It's certainly cause for concern but I would say the major change over the years has been that in addition to buying good and reliable things that last (and maybe are expensive), you can also buy cheap crappy stuff that breaks down. To use headphones as an example you can still go get a pair of wired Sony headphones that will have great sound and last for a decade for $50. I just did. (Or you can spend more and get even better.) I've also bought $15 Chinese Bluetooth earbuds that were janky and dead in less than a year. Sometimes the simple, older, reliable stuff is better. You can build a desktop PC that will last you for a decade with occasionally upgrading components. Now you can do it with a Framework laptop too. Personally I bought a nice i7 laptop about a decade ago and will only get around to retiring it this year, it stopped being my main workhorse several years ago but has been great as a secondary living room entertainment machine. I don't need the latest greatest, I play a lot of retro and indie games and watch movies at picture qualities that video snobs would sneer at, but that gets back to whether you want to develop expensive tastes or not. Not that life has fundamentally become unliveably expensive. There are some places where cost of living really is a serious problem - homes, health care, education. But a lot of this I feel is really about younger generations having voracious consumer appetites, like an absolutely off-the-charts, record-setting desire for luxury and status. A lot of it is driven by a heightened sense of needing to keep up, look good on Instagram etc. which is a whole other can of worms. Do you really need to keep up with the rat race, the Joneses, the latest fashions etc.? Maybe it's different now, but the Boomers went through their own version of this, they had their big hippie anti-materialism movement in the 60's (and then by the 80's they seemed to have forgotten all about it).