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Ignoring the meat and substance of your post, I think you're right that we compare ourselves to our (grand)parents. Hedonistic treadmills seem to prove to me that all the things we care about like money, leisure, social status, are relative. And self-preservation instincts mean we'll put up with anything. We take our set-point from how (we think) the older generations lived.
"Livable wage" redditors who feel entitled to a certain amount of money and lifestyle are not thinking economically. "Everyone deserves a livable wage" is a moral statement, not an economic one. Their moral intuition is based what the older generations had. You could even call it envy (a pejorative for wanting fairness).
As a mid-20s single white male (what you'd expect from a Mottepoaster and early Scott reader), most of my worldview is driven by the realities of dating. The reason why I feel entitled to marrying a skinny woman is not because it is feasible for me from a (sexual) market perspective. It is a moral opinion first and foremost. I am comparing myself to the generations past. My grandparents could visit the beach without a torrent of obese women assaulting their eyes. I have no such luxury.
It is commonly said that the housing market is insane. Now I think money is boring and I don't know anything about the housing market. But the entire premise is a weird perversion of the is-ought distinction. It doesn't really matter if expensive houses are caused by illegal immigration, zoning laws, lizardmen in skinsuits, whatever. People are angry because they are comparing themselves to the older generations, not because they are thinking in economical or technical terms.
I can compare to my slightly younger self here because I bought a house over a decade ago, a condo about a decade ago, and I will soon almost certainly rent because housing costs have exploded, even though I am far wealthier than I was the last times I moved in the same metro area.
Lower success level, but same. The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier. Rent was still cheap where I live and I was making stupid money for what I was doing ($50K a year mostly driving for a locally-owned food delivery company and my rent was a shade under $500/month). Post-covid inflation blew all that up and while I just got my big career change break spending a year making less than I did straight out of college driving for Papa John's really sucked compared to the non-stop party that was my late 20s.
Yes, but the Millennials were STILL complaining about how bad it was. That was the era in which occasionally one of them would post such nonsense and I'd go to FRED and pick graph after graph showing how each of the things they talked about was actually at an all-time good RIGHT NOW (i.e. at the time of the post)
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Mostly they are comparing themselves to imaginary versions of older generations. How many millennials or zoomers include the draft, stagflation and multiple recessions, and sky-high interest rates as part of their comparison?
They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.
It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.
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