Maybe the fact that no one thinks this way anymore explains why everyone complains their six-figure income is constantly eaten up by replacing cheap shit.
And that would have knock on effects for huge societal issues like climate change. Imagine how much cheap shit wouldn't need to be made if so many people weren't deliberately kept on the edge of poverty so as to foster consumption practices that make stock prices go up?
But also - I think the 1950s-80s were a complete abberation in which working middle class people could afford a better lifestyle every year. Not "every generation before" ours could afford a house and two cars on a factory income with a pension. Really only one generation got that, and it was mostly due to winning a world war that left us the world's only major supplier of everything, able to project military power and gobble up all the cheap oil and raw materials. Previous generations had no such thing. My grandfather grew up without indoor plumbing. He also worked 12 hours a day. He couldn't afford a modest house until his late 30s, which was after the war. Go further back and look at the stock bubbles and robber barons of the 19th Century. The wealth and pay distribution we have now is closer to historical norms than anything in the 1960s was. The major difference is our baseline quality of life is higher in the sense that everyone can afford a cheap couch (if they want one). I have to think economically like my grandparents, not like my parents.
People like my grandparents built this country by saving and sacrificing their comforts. People like my parents, boomers, got an incredibly easy ride. Now their kids expect it to be that easy. But cheap money can't go on forever, and it's cheap money and a two-car suburban family lifestyle that did all the environmental damage of the mid 20th Century that we're still trying to slow down or reverse.
tl;dr saving and buying the better couch is a more effective means of changing the status quo than complaining that everything is harder for our generation.
I don't mind saving and sacrificing, that sounds awesome. The problem is that I'm not saving, sacrificing, working hard, etc. for any meaningful purpose, it's exclusively to subsidize some greedy CEOs/oligarchs luxurious lifestyles.
There's this funny notion now that work needs to be personally fulfilling or important to humanity or else it's not worth it. It's worth it if you can save money, afford a better life, educate your kids.
Getting fixated on the inherent unfairness of the world, where some people who have wealth and things you can't afford, seems to be a frequent cop out. If you want to be a union organizer and do things to change the inequality of the system, great. That doesn't mean that working to improve your own existence is a waste of time.
We have so much stuff we don't need, and we barely scratch the surface of utility of the stuff we have before throwing it out.