What you are talking about is having higher quality of life, despite having lower wealth.
But that's a separate subject in my opinion.
But that's a separate subject in my opinion.
Within bounds it's possible to compare. Two families living on the same street, one has $10k higher income than the other, the higher income family has (at least the potential for) a higher QoL.
But comparing someone with a high income in a downtown flatshare who has an ~infinite entertainment budget to someone who is well on the way to owning a home outright in the suburbs is really hard (e.g. a 30yo in London, vs their parents at 30yo).
The former doesn't have a higher or lower QoL than the latter because you can't define a benchmark without it being opinionated.
Other areas do exist that could allow people to move out of the city to a cheaper owned home in the suburbs. Personally I don't think that's a good solution though because suburbs are pretty inefficient and seem likely to exacerbate the climate problem we're running full speed into. I just wanted to point out that you can form some comparison because they are both still relatively attainable. (I might be mistaken on the real estate landscape in the UK since I'm from the US, if so just disregard this comment)
My other comment is mostly aimed at GP, but it seems that it has persisted down the comment chain, which is that from everything I've heard and read, "Higher income, lower wealth" is not an accurate assessment of what is happening when you factor in inflation. It's more of "The same/lower income, lower wealth" on average. Even still though, given the ideals of a capitalist system saying that owning capital is literally worth capital itself, lower long term wealth is most definitely a long term problem because this is a runaway feedback loop of capital concentrating in the top and the lower non capital owning members of society are slaves to capital. You might be technically earning a wage and thus not fit the technical definition of slavery, but if you have less and less freedom (defined as less freedom through lack of actual choice) because of it, I see very little difference.
On the flip side, my parents talk about when I was first born and they had to choose between two toys because they couldn't afford both (a mirror and a little bird - maybe $20 each). I have never had an issue with access to money, even when I had nearly nothing in the bank and was paying down my student loans as fast as possible and something came up - a quick call to the bank was all that stood between me and enough to finance a full repair across the next 3 months instead of a bandaid. My parents didn't have that type of access to credit.
Me and my dad worked in a similar role (software development - him for a bank, me for defense) out of college. Granted, even inflation adjusted I made a lot more than him right out of school.
Also, even though my parents had a house way younger than me I wouldn't want a credit card with the interest rate my parents were paying on their house. It was insane.