With inflation and increasing inequality I'm already living a more "impoverished" life than my parents when they were my age, yet economic growth has been out of control. I don't think your vision of "most of us" is at all connected to reality.
No, in fact, your idea of “reality” is completely disconnected from the actual real world.
A billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty over the last generation. The share of extreme poverty worldwide has declined. Most of the rest are expected to be lifted until 2030. [1]
Even comparing your life to your parents, you have access to better medical drugs, more information, better technology, and depending on where you live, also bigger and better apartments and cheaper transport.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#is-the-world-on-t...
I would need to make at least 50% more income than my dad at each stage of his life for this to be true.
Of course, many low-middle-class to working class people from the West will also fall on the wrong side of all this, but in a way they already have started experiencing it, like you mention (you can look at existing NIMBY policies in the West as de facto de-growth policies that directly and negatively affect those socio-economic chunks of the populace).
According to them, the actual "degrowth" has to happen in the global north where economies are over-saturated [0]:
> We live in a world where poverty remains and those with unmet needs require more resources to satisfy them. We also live in an ecologically-constrained world struggling to cut emissions as fast as possible. In that context, by reducing consumption in the global North (and more generally for all of those who are over-consuming), one could free some of these resources for the people who need it the most. Ensuring basic needs and well-being for all necessarily implies limiting consumption in high-income regions and wealthy households in order to enable resource-poor countries and households to reach decent standards of living. In other words, degrowth in the global North is a prerequisite for sustainable development in the global South.
[0]: https://timotheeparrique.com/sufficiency-means-degrowth/
The question doesn't really matter. Whether we want it or not, economics will ultimately be subject to the laws of physics. We cannot sustain infinite growth on a planet with finite resources and carrying capacity. We've known this as far back as 1966 when Kenneth Boulding touched on these ideas in his essay "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth" [0].
Holding the global north accountable for their footprint is to me one of sanest and most civilized pathways considering the ensuing implications of alternative scenarios.
[0] http://arachnid.biosci.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Boul...
Probably not. You may personally be experiencing downward mobility, but real median household income is much higher in the US today than it was 30 years ago.
Edit: In US terms, "real" means that it has been inflation-adjusted. I don't know how it is in the US, but elsewhere governments frequently publish inflation numbers that have nothing to do with purchasing power (i.e. the inflation can be 3%, but the purchasing power of a household has still gone down by 5.4%). This makes such numbers seem a lot rosier than they are. Linking to actual data (which allows for looking at the whole picture rather than whatever graphs an agency chose to publish) allows us to see what's going on properly.