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Notes -
Quibble with one of your examples - of the recent college grads I know well (<5 years out of college, with annual incomes ranging from ~$15k to more than $500k), none of them have any streaming service subscriptions. Only one or two of them have cable TV (and none of the rich ones!). At least in this example, it seems hard to assign any blame for the malaise to the notion that one will never "level up" to paid streaming when even the very-wealthy are pirates too.
Is your model that any absolute measure of life-ease is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is a feeling that tomorrow will be easier than today? If so, then we have to assume that living in a wealthy society is the problem in itself (as any additional dollar will buy less and less utility, and at a certain point all pressing needs are taken care of, as you note). If not, in what sense must the poorer of these recent grads be "living like monks" if their consumption habits are very similar (wrt streaming at least)?
If you discovered that some very cheap good is only slightly worse than some expensive good you could buy instead, why would you feel bad about buying the cheap good? Even if you could easily afford the expensive good, why shouldn't you still buy the cheap good and save the rest? Yes status signaling, but there's no solution to status signals being costly, a cheap signal is inherently worthless. Why shouldn't this situation make me feel wealthy beyond belief?
If this is what's happening, I would expect extremely positive vibes - not a vibecession. I think a materialist explanation for the vibecession has to lead from goods that are legitimately expensive, housing in choice locales for example, not things being too cheap!
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